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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Mongoid follows versioning guidelines as outlined by the Semantic Versioning Specification, so you can expect only backwards incompatible changes in major versions

I will note that this reverses the direction of implications.

In SemVer, you should expect breaking changes only in major versions. (All version changes with breaking changes should be major, but nonbreaking changes can occur in major or minor versions.)

This is not the same as expecting only breaking changes in major versions. (Which would mean all changes in major versions should be breaking, nonbreaking changes cannot occur in major versions, and breaking changes might still occur in minor versions.) .

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I'm guessing the sentence they wrote is just a consequence of English not being the author's primary language. I frequently see ESL speakers get adjective and adverb positions wrong in ways that unintentially change the meaning.

Even skilled English speakers make mistakes here because English is both very permissive about word order, but also tends to give different shades of meaning to each other. "Only" is a pernicious one. When I got my last book copyedited, fixing the location of "only" was one of the most common changes.

There is a real parallel between this mistake and the or() mistake. As a native English speaker I glossed over both of them at the first reading.

> When I got my last book copyedited, fixing the location of "only" was one of the most common changes.

I remember a puzzle which presented a (fairly long) sentence and asked "provide a word that can be correctly inserted at any point in this sentence".

The answer was "only". (Of course the meaning would change according to where the "only" was placed, but still... you'd have a hard time inserting "experience" at every position of a sentence.)

In case anybody is wondering, the sentence normally given as an example of this is “She told him that she loved him”. You can put the word “only” anywhere in that sentence and each position makes the sentence mean something different.

As a technicality, while it's possible for "she only told him that she loved him" and "she told him only that she loved him" to mean different things, it's also possible for them to mean the same thing.

(And in fact, the primary meaning of the first sentence is the one identical to the meaning of the second - you can read it "she only told him that she loved him [and she didn't do anything else]", but by default you'll read it "she only told him that she loved him [and she didn't tell him anything else]".)

The reason for the ambiguity is that the verb is the head of the sentence, and so an "only" placed to scope over the verb has several different options for where the scope "really is".

It’s kind of like the saying, “all that glitters is not gold”. Gold doesn’t glitter? That makes no sense.

English syntax is not mathematical logic. The song, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is not a song about someone who is forced to receive satisfaction.

I guess Shakespeare did write it that way, but I've always heard the saying as "Not all that glitters is gold." Perhaps he took some poetic license at the expense of logical correctness.

> Shakespeare […] Perhaps he took some poetic license

That was kind of his thing, when he wasn’t just inventing words to fit rhyme/meter/mood.

He’s not who you would go to if you wanted unambiguous documentation of the guarantees you were providing downstream users, that wasn’t really his thing.

A lot of the confusion in English can be relieved, sometimes, by flipping clauses around. “All that glitters / is not / gold” ⇒ “gold / is not / all that glitters.”

Somewhat related to your points of music...

There's an episode of "This is Pop!" on Netflix that explores why the Swedes write so many pop hits.

One of the arguments presented is that they speak English well as a second/third language so they're less focused on the lyrics making sense and being grammatically correct, and are free to make lyrics that sound like they work but are non-sensical on reflection. It's just the right amount of separation from the language.

Ever since I saw that, I've been listening closer to a lot of the top pop songs over the last decade, and it's fascinating how English is so breakable while sounding right to our mind, but falls apart under scrutiny. (Obviously this is not unique to the swedish writers, even people who only speak English do it as well)

The song “I want it that way” comes to mind, the song topped many charts including in the US, and the lyrics are very strange upon reflection. What does “I never wanna hear you say. I want it that way.” mean exactly? Apparently the Swedish songwriter barely spoke any English at all at the time.

>> I never wanna hear you say, "I want it that way" <<

Probably?

That's actually one of the songs that's mentioned, as well as Oops I Did It Again by Britney and Hit Me Baby One More Time

Even more recently, Shake it Off by Taylor Swift.

Somewhat along the same lines, I was watching the Get Back documentary on the Beatles and the number of songs they write by effectively scatting and then filling in the words that were their big hits is amazing.

Again they're writing to fit the tune, then in filling the words based on a general theme. It's very different than the songs they write where you can tell someone's sat down and written the words first.

It’s curious that a Russian version is much more precise:

“Not everything that glitters is gold”. (The truly 1:1 translation is “not everything is gold that glitters” but that word order felt very wrong and I believe the change doesn’t change the meaning, does it ?)

How does it sound for a native speaker ?

I am a native speaker of English, yet my knowledge of its grammar is almost entirely informal. Having said that, it seems to me that in the 1:1 translation, the object of ‘is’ is ‘gold that glitters’, rather than just ‘gold’, and its subject is ‘everything’ rather than ‘everything that glitters’, and that these are semantic differences, as the intended meaning is specifically about things that glitter. I hope someone more knowledgable can cite the relevant rules here, whether for or against this reading.

To avoid ambiguity (whether actual or merely perceived by me), I might say “Just because something glitters, it need not be gold”, but that is not much of an aphorism!

> English syntax is not mathematical logic

Open any book or paper on semantics (the linguistics kind, not the philosophy or the early-20th-century pseudoscience kind) and you might be surprised :) It’s just that the logic is not that straightforward to get out, and of course there’s semantics (the literal meaning, where “Can you pass the salt?” is a question about ability) and then there’s pragmatics (the thing one is actually trying to communicate, where “Can you pass the salt?” is a request with certain degrees of respect and formality attached to it).

> “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”

This is probably not a very good example as it’s just (AFAIU) not strictly “standard English” in that it exhibits negative concord absent from the standard grammar (for dramatic effect, although “We Don’t Need No Education” is probably a better case). That is to say, this is a phrase in a language (which is very similar to standard English but not quite the same) where the grammar requires dummy negations on complements of negative verbs—a purely syntactic thing that doesn’t even reach the layer of semantics / logic.

But then many other varieties of English do that (I remember reading somewhere that the dialect that gave rise to the current standard is actually somewhat unusual among other dialects in that respect), so does my native Russian (and other Slavic languages, and some but not all Romance ones), and Japanese actually requires you to negate the adjective when using the adverb meaning “hardly, not very”[1] while at the same time using some double negations as polite affirmations[2].

[1] https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/18006

[2] https://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/teacher/36.html

Reminds me the "any cars that have been lapped by the leader will be required to pass the cars on the lead lap and the safety car" clause in the Formula 1 racing regulations (article 48.12), which got a lot of attention after the last race in the season.

Red Bull Racing argued that in that sentence "any" doesn't mean "all". As a non-native speaker, this is just mind games for me.

More reading: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/580131/does-any-...

If you really have a lot of free time, interest in regulations, F1 AND the English language, this deep dive can also be interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/F1Technical/comments/rkv633/unpacki...

I'm a native English speaker with a degree in linguistics, but I didn't appreciate how hard "some/any" are for native speakers until a Polish colleague asked me to explain it, and I pretty much failed. It's something you learn how to do intuitively, but when you try to formulate a consistent set of rules explaining why you choose one over the other, it turns out to be pretty difficult.

A decent amount of English is full of inconsistencies like this. Every language has its warts, of course, but like you I never really realized how difficult English is as a language until asked to explain certain behaviors to non-native speakers.

They may actually mean what they say. It’s not uncommon for projects to release the last minor version at the same time as the next major. For example, Drupal 9.0.0 was functionally equivalent to Drupal 8.9.0, except 9.0 had all deprecations dropped. New 9.0+ only features didn’t show up until 9.1.

Yeah, that is probably the smart way to do it. Frontload all of your necessary new features in 8.9/9.0-dev (so you can complete the deprecations), roll over the major and remove only the deprecated code paths without introducing any new ones.

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