On Tuesday, April 19, 2016 at 9:34:13 AM UTC+2, Erik Bray wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:11 AM, William Stein <[email protected]
> <javascript:>> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Kwankyu Lee <[email protected]
> <javascript:>> wrote:
> >> Which one is correct?
> >>
> >> (1) "This is based on code by A and B"
> >> (2) "This is based on codes by A and B"
> >> (3) "This is based on the codes by A and B"
> >>
> >> I am just curious. I am not a native English speaker.
> >
> > In American, (1) is correct.
> >
> > I just did Google searches for the exact string "This is based on the
> > codes by" and "This is based on codes by" and it says "No results
> > found" in both cases, so (2) and (3) are definitely wrong in English.
>
> I'm surprised no results came up. Something I noticed quickly when I
> first started working with astronomers and astrophysicists was that
> it's not uncommon for researchers in those fields to refer to their
> software as "codes". I usually don't say anything directly to them
> because I don't want to be a pedantic jerk. But it always just struck
> me as odd, and I've complained about it a few times in other contexts.
> It doesn't help that many researchers don't have strong programming
> backgrounds and see even open source software as something of a black
> box--and to me calling it "codes" only makes it worse. As if it's a
> pile of cryptic runes to be decoded. But it's just a linguistic
> oddity I guess :)
>
Every field has its own jargon, and countable "code" is simply established
lingo in parts of the scientific computing community, appearing in tens of
thousands of papers. It usually has a more narrow meaning: "a code" is a
polished software package for a specific numerical or scientific task ("a
code for plasma simulation", "a comparison of finite element codes"), not
an arbitrary sampling of source code. "Codes" is certainly incorrect in any
other context, but I think "correcting" the domain-specific usage is overly
pedantic. "Algebra" to most people is something uncountable, but
theoretical mathematicians are perfectly fine with "algebras"...
Fredrik
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