Automattic / Automattic/harper

Flag "few" used when it should be "a few"

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#1,114 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement good first issue grammar harper-core linting
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Rust
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Description

## Description

This is extremely common among Arabic speakers no matter how good their English is, but I'm pretty sure others make it too.

"Few" has the implication of "hardly any", insufficient, not enough, so tends negative.
"A few" on the other hand tends positive as in "better than nothing" or "not a lot but probably enough".

## Resources

- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/commonly-confused-words/few-a-few/
- https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/The-Difference-Between-Few-and-A-Few-

## Examples

- [A teacher is in the process of generating **few** reports based ...](https://gist.github.com/rajkushwaha0521/09cd5b807b5c84b9df36432d22c5d5e9)
- After **few** minutes all kube-system pods begin crashing.
- [Tomcat 9.0 server stop **few** minutes after start without any ...](https://github.com/redhat-developer/vscode-rsp-ui/issues/282)
- [Fix **few** typos](https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/actions/runs/13876611431)
This is a pretty good example as to a native English speaker it looks like an instruction to fix some typos but not to fix all of them.
- [After **few** seconds window turns white · Issue #11099](https://github.com/podman-desktop/podman-desktop/issues/11099)
- [It's great and now I am sharing **few** scripts.](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp/discussions/2894)
Implies that previous more scripts were shared.
- **Few** minutes after I posted this I found that unless I set the below explicitly in settings:
- can you tell me **few** specific problems with using rust for systems programming?

## Potential False Positives

I imagine it will be quite difficult to design heuristics to detect this.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No source file, test, or entry point is named. Start by locating how the grammar checker handles “few” and review the linked examples and references; define heuristics that distinguish “few” from “a few,” including the listed potential false positives. Done means the intended examples are detected without incorrectly changing valid uses.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
devtools
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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