Few weeks ago I watch one video on YouTube by Tomasz Dziurko: Jinkubator #28 – 1011 błędów w rekrutacji, które pokazują jaki będzie twój kod. It’s in polish, but some of you may enjoy. I really fall in love with this sentence: I write and read faily well ;-)

I write about this because yesterday I faced one English grammar problem. During implementation of one feature I’ve add an method to our interface:

 getCategoriesCodes() 

It’s about returning list of codes for different categories. One of my code reviewer told me that this against English grammar – I couldn’t believe ;-)

First because other similar methods looks the same eg:

getSubCategoriesCodes()

Second it was against my logic, but after all it occurs that my logic throws there RuntimeException ;-)

I even ask question about it on StackOverflow and the conclusion was:

As both a native English speaker and a Java programmer: getCategoryCodes() is preferable. getCategoriesCodes() implies to me that I am getting multiple codes for each category, or that the codes relate to the collection of categories, rather than a code for each category.

As an example from “real” English: a car has one driver; you would refer to the drivers of many cars as “car drivers”, not “cars drivers”.

If you are interested in more detailed discussion please read my post: Java naming conventions versus English language correctness