2012/1/25 Bartosz Dziewoński [email protected]:
English is not my first language, but I’ll dare to disagree with you
here. “ware”, or “middleware”, for me looks like a perfect regular
noun and I see no error in pluralizing it - “wares” or “middlewares”
sound just fine and keep the meaning of “multiple items of ”, while
“waters” or “furnitures” don’t.
With all due respect, you are wrong.
A baker can sell his wares, but he cannot sell his ware.
This is an egregious, embarrassing linguistic error, on the scale of
using the wrong gender for a pronoun (“il aime son soeur”) or the
wrong tense for a verb (“we will went to the movies”) and if it
doesn’t make your skin crawl, then you are not a bad person, but you
are also probably not a native English speaker.
See Mass noun - Wikipedia for the full scoop:
“In English, mass nouns are characterized by the fact that they cannot
be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of
measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article
(a or an). Thus, the mass noun “water” is quantified as “20 liters of
water” while the count noun “chair” is quantified as “20 chairs”.
However, mass nouns (like count nouns) can be quantified in relative
terms without unit specification (e.g., “much water,” “many chairs”).”
“software” is also a mass noun. You write a piece of software, or a
software program, never “a software”.
They’ve got a great metaphor already baked in – why not call them
“shelves” or “units” or “pies” or something else that goes on a rack?
This is just my opinion, but I think Ruby libraries already have
enough of clever puns with no benefit.
I agree with you there. I was kidding about the pies. 
(But not about “units” or “modules” or “parts” or something like that.)
P.S. Ruby itself, since it was written mainly by non-native English
speakers, also has a few linguistic groaners, like using “case” to
mean “several cases” and “accessor” to mean “writer” (as well as
“reader”).
