Survey results: singular or plural for datetime component setters?

G'day:
Yesterday I asked you whether for methods for setting the discrete components of a datetime whether you prefer singular - eg: setMinute() - or plural - setMinutes(). The reason for this is that Adobe are adding those methods in ColdFusion 2016, and there seems to be some flip-flopping on whether each one should be singular or plural. Details here:  3374275: Add granularity to createDateTime().

I've had 50 responses now, and the trend is fairly clear, so I'll tabulate the results:

Component	Singular	Plural
Year	96%	4%
Month	96%	4%
Day	96%	4%
Hour	80%	20%
Minute	76%	24%
Second	72%	28%
Millisecond	72%	28%

So that's reasonably clear: most people prefer singular. That said, a decent percentage of people prefer singular for the date components and but plural for the time components.

Two people went plural for everything; 35 went singular for everything. One person went singular for everything except for the minute component (slightly odd choice, that one, I reckon).

There were a few comments too:

I would go for singular even though some sound better as plurals. Though in the end as long as it's consistently one or the other and not a horrible mix I would be OK with it.

This is my opinion too. It's not an exercise in grammatical accuracy or even to do with how human language would do it. They're methods of an object.

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Arse Arse Arse

Yes. Yes you are. At least you spelt it right though.

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you're setting an hour, not a range of hours

This came out a bit, and not something that occurred to me previously, but they're correct.

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As far as getting or setting, I think the plural form is more conceptually consistent. Though both can be equally argued for. Second refers to the value place, but Seconds refers to values in that place. I believe both Java and Javascript use setSeconds(), which is probably more comparable to ColdFusion, but other languages use setSecond() and set('second'), and SQL uses dateAdd('seconds'...), so there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of consistency across languages. In the end, I hate date manipulation anyway, so whatever method they choose will work for me. Unless they go with something like changeTime('addSecond(s)'). :-)

I'd like it if you could tease out why plural is more conceptually consistent. I don't get that.

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plural makes no sense to me here? You are setting the "hour of the day" not the "hours of the day"

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I avoid plurals on my methods and DB field names. I have exactly 2 exceptions to this rule: Comments Details IMHO, these two by their nature are not singular. I also thing of these as being free-form text.

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Consistency above all else. As indicated by my responses above, my preference is singular. This is in part because some just don't work (for me, mentally) as plurals. Consider: setYears()? Ew. Combine that logical preference for _some_ of them to be singular, with the desire for _all_ of them to be consistent, and you arrive at: All of them should be singular.

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Either way, just please be consistent!

Good pragmatism.

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use singular or plural to match JS implementation

Why JS? I don't think the JS implementation here is very sensible, and I was left wondering why they made the decision that they did.

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I prefer all singular. Especially since year(), month(), day(), hour(), minute(), second() exist in the language. I think it'd be odd to keep those as-is and introduce .setHours(), .setMinutes(), setSeconds(). I'd rather introduce millisecond()/.setMillisecond(), even if I don't typically say "the millisecond", and retain consistency. On a different note, I am happy to see Adobe presented their proposal so that we can offer feedback. Very nice there. Thanks Adam for doing this survey!, -Aaron

Cheers dude.

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Just follow what JavaScript has already done!

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You are setting a single value of a property not several values although that value could be more than 1.

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I would match the javascript date object setters: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date they use setDate() instead of setDay() for the date part of the month.

Again... I think JS ballsed this up, so not a good precedent to follow. There is also not intrinsic connection between CFML and JS to warrant following their precedent in the first place.

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If you go look at the current date/time functions on cfdocs.org, you see MOST of the function names are singular (daysinMonth, daysinyear only plural), so it seems to me that Singular should be used to keep in sync with the rest of the date/time functions.

Good call. I did not check that. So internal consistency would be to be singular. The existing procedural "getters" are all singular, for example: year()... through to second().

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You are setting a single value, therefore, it should be singular. setMillisecond() = set the millisecond value to

Correct.

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Initially, I favored the plural for the Minutes, Seconds, and Milliseconds. But after thinking about it more, I think that the singular makes the most sense, and will help to keep the purpose clear. Otherwise, I could see someone saying those functions should take ranges.

Thanks for giving it some thought, and sufficiently so for you to actually change your position on the matter. Nice one.

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Unsure as to why anyone would want some plural and some not. Let's pick a sensible rule and stick with it throughout. Signular all the way, as the method is referring to the property, not multiple things.

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Date/Time is a singular entity If you were setting a range/duration, then this should plural

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Adam loves the wallabies

Specifically their services to the All Blacks 2015 World Cup campaign. Cheers for that, Andy.

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So there's a suggested case for following JavaScript's Date methods, which would be:

• setFullYear() (setYear() is deprecated)
• setMonth()
• setDate()
• setHours()
• setMinutes()
• setSeconds()
• setMilliseconds()  

What a mess. There's four different approaches in the first four methods. Screw that. This is also ignoring the fact that those ones don't match the existing getter functions CFML already has. I think this is a pretty invalid position to take, to be honest.

The people advocating for this probably just meant in the context of plurals for hours, minutes, seconds, but I wanted to demonstrate that I think not a lot of thought went into how JavaScript did this, so I don't think there's a good reason to follow them.

Other people reckon using plurals for some but not others based on how one would use them in English: it's quite likely to refer to the year of the date, but the minutes of the hour. But the hour of the day. English is not a very sensible language, and not everyone speaks English so I think following English's weirdo rules (even though these words are in English) is about as helpful as following JavaScript.

So at the beginning of this I was fairly certain sticking with singular would be the better approach, and the more I think about it now and look at what other people say, I am even more adamant. I am going to advocate on 3374275 that they stick with singular. Which, indeed, is what they've already done and they were going to change it to plural for hours, minutes and seconds, so this saves them some work.

Cheers everyone.

And thanks, Andy, for reminding me how the All Blacks smashed the Wallabies in the Rugby World Cup final.

Righto.

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Adam