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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 months ago by notnotmike@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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[-] Fallenwout@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Simple, don't use a thousand separator. One thousand and a half would be 1000.5

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This is fine for numbers that only have one separator. But they get difficult to read when they get longer. No reasonable person can read 957245815627 and functionally parse it in their minds. Can you tell at a glance, without counting digits that the number is nine trillion? Ninety billion? Nine hundred billion? You could be off by entire orders of magnitude and not even realize it until you stop and count the individual digits.

Breaking it up into 957,245,815,627 helps the user visually see the hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions the same way we use them in language. The comma is a stand-in for the place descriptor. 957(billion)245(million)815(thousand)627. So now your brain can easily parse that there are 245 millions in this number, instead of accidentally seeing 724 or 458.

[-] Birch@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

A comma here could also be parsed as a vector, an apostrophe has never been used in numbers as anything other than a thousand separator. Well, except as the transpose command in Matlab... or to indicate a character vector... fuck. Just use scientific notation or spell it out for large numbers.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024

472 points (98.2% liked)

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