I'm under the impression this is a Chinese vs. Japanese difference. Shoveling food into your mouth is perfectly acceptable in Chinese etiquette but discouraged in Japanese. Accordingly the Japanese cook their rice to clump together so it's easier to pick up using your chopsticks so that you don't have to resort to shoveling.
I totally agree with this, and will add that another benefit of whimsical names is discoverability. If your project is named plugin-update-checker and I want to find documentation on it, it's likely going to be buried in a bunch of other irrelevant search results about plugin update checkers in general. If it was called SocketToMe instead, I'm going to find much better search results.
I will share a concrete example where I've recently run into this problem.
In order to make use of OpenStruct, `require 'ostruct'` first needs to be declared. Our code neglected to make that declaration, and we saw failures when it was deployed. This code, however, passed all of our tests. We discovered it was because our testing framework included rspec-expectations, which has a dependency on diff-lcs[1], and diff-lcs itself declares `require 'ostruct'`[2]. Because of this, ostruct was loaded globally before our code was tested, which silently masked the underlying issue.
This being said, I do understand the sentiment that this feature seems superfluous and may introduce unnecessary complication, especially from a Rubyist's point of view. The underlying mental model of Ruby dependency management is different from many other languages, and it's something to keep in mind when coming from other languages that do have scope for declared dependencies.
When the comment you replied to mentioned "Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all", I understood it to mean that Chinese has not featured any general system of marking plural by grammatical means[1], which is what is usually understood by the term "plural"[2], not that Chinese has no ability to express a more-than-one count distinction at all (which isn't the case in any language as far as I'm aware).
> It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there.
It is productive in a limited sense in that way, but not as a general plural marker as you're arguing, and it's limited because 美国的妈妈们 means "American mothers" in that it necessarily refers to them as a collective group (which I argue is an instance of metonymy) rather than a set of more than one "American mother". For instance you cannot say *三个美国的妈妈们 to mean "three American mothers"; you must instead say 三个美国的妈妈 because 美国的妈妈们 can only ever refer to the entire collective group.
> I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb
This is a feature of UK English where collective nouns agree with plural forms of verbs. US English on the other hand, requires the singular form[3][4]. This has no bearing on how we analyze Chinese.
To be more accurate, 们 isn't a plural marker more because of the fact that it's not productive[1], rather than the fact that Chinese doesn't have declension. If 们 were able to be suffixed to any noun to make it plural, then you could consider it to be a plural marker, even though the noun isn't technically declined. That's not the case anyway though, since 们 can only be used with a closed set of pronouns or in a limited way to refer to groups represented by the noun its attached to (in this sense it's more of a metonymic[2] marker rather than a plural marker). For example, 白宮们 can be used to translate "the White House" when it refers to the President and his administration, and cannot be used to mean "white houses".
Green (綠) in Chinese also came later. In Old Chinese, 青 was generally used to represent both blue and green colors.
While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold.
> This is the first and only Windows to denote the current time zone on the map. Surprisingly, in the next editions of Windows, the world map simply occupies space and the highlight is nowhere to be seen.
> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.
> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.
No, this is a false cognate. Chinese bāo (包) is short for miànbāo (麵包), literally meaning "flour wrap/package", and its use has been attested since the Song Dynasty (ca. 11th century), whereas the Portuguese didn't have contact with China until the 16th century. The pronunciation of 包 at that time was still mostly similar to what it is today – using IPA notation, it is reconstructed as /pˠau/, compared to /pau̯/ today.
I'm not affiliated nor do I personally have any experience with this service, but have heard good things about the Canto To Mando Blueprint: https://www.thecmblueprint.com/
> Translate "please give me his book" to Cantonese.
> > "請俾我佢嘅書" is the Cantonese translation for "please give me his book".
This appears generally fine though stylistically not as colloquial. Using 請 for "please" is considered more formal since it's usually more written than spoken. In addition, it uses the Cantonese genitive particle 嘅, though I think most speakers would prefer to use the measure word 本 in this context, but this is still perfectly grammatical. Lastly, it still retains the same word order for direct and indirect objects as Standard Written Chinese, which while not completely colloquial, is still considered acceptable when spoken.
BTW, since written Cantonese isn't standardized, 畀 can often be seen written as 俾, but they refer to the same word.
> Translate "唔該你畀佢本書我" to English.
> > The Cantonese phrase "唔該你畀佢本書我" translates to "Please give me his book" in English.
I just tried Bing Translate, and even though it nominally supports "Cantonese (Traditional)", their translations don't seem to be much better for the example sentence I gave.
"Please give me his book" is translated to: 請把他的書畀我。 While it does use the usual Cantonese word for "give" (畀), the rest of the sentence still mostly uses Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, notably the 把 construction, the third-person pronoun 他, and the use of the 的 genitive particle, which aren't typically used in spoken Cantonese.
Conversely, 唔該你畀佢本書我 is translated to: "Please give him this book me." This seems to indicate that it doesn't understand Cantonese's ability to use measure words (such as 本) as genitive particles, nor does it understand that the word order of the direct and indirect objects in the sentence are switched compared to the usual order in Standard Written Chinese.
Evidence that Chinese can be perfectly understandable written without the use of characters can be seen in the Dungan language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which can be considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
> Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.)
Indeed, because of the way Dungan is written, it ended up evolving differently with respect to how new vocabulary is derived, often borrowing words phonetically from Russian instead of constructing them from Chinese morphemes that might otherwise be considered ambiguous when used individually.