7 ms·

I find it more interesting that some people expect the British not to use British English. It's not a choice, we just adhere to how the language was created.

• saagarjha 7y ago
  > Apart from the US, British spelling differences are mostly followed by other countries where English is the main language too. Probably because many of them were former English colonies.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > > Apart from the US, British spelling differences are mostly followed by other countries where English is the main language too. > Probably because many of them were former English colonies. The US was also a set of former English (well, British, most recently) colonies.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Right, and it gained independence hundreds of years before any of the others. It's had a lot of time to develop its own dialect.
• mantap 7y ago
  I am from UK, but for professional purposes I always use American spellings in APIs, even if it's an open source project and I'm the only author. It's objectively better for everybody to use a standard consistent spelling across all APIs. For comments I use British English, I wouldn't know how to write American grammar if I tried.
  • billfruit 7y ago
    But probably larger number of English speakers(including large countries in the Commonwealth like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, ) use the British spelling than American one.
    • mlnj 7y ago
      Yup. I try to use Americanized versions when I know I am interacting with one. The British spelling is the default.
  • wsgeorge 7y ago
    I remember once getting confused when Android Studio kept pointing out that an Android SDK method I was calling didn't exist. Turned out I was using the British spelling of "colour". That was the moment I realised most of the api calls I'd been making used the American spelling.
  • MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    Generally agreed, if universality is a goal of the codebase. Eric S Raymond [0] and Jeff Atwood [1][2] have both written about the merits of the universal use of English in software development, and I think their reasoning can be extended to American English specifically. I say this as a Brit, generally fond of our proper spelling. To expand on my proviso: if a codebase is written by and for British developers, I see little reason to use American English. For a serious international FOSS project though, American English makes the most sense. It's costly to have a codebase undecided on proper English vs American English. If Alice writes 'initialize' and Bob writes 'initialise', it causes pain for everyone. This even applies to keywords and reserved identifiers. For instance, in Ruby, methods named 'initialize' get special treatment. American English tends to dominate in tech, so if we have to make a choice, it's clear enough which one it should be. Incidentally, Google [3], and apparently also Microsoft [4], agree with us. > For comments I use British English, I wouldn't know how to write American grammar if I tried. I think I could cope if the need arose (it hasn't for some time, for me). As you imply, the real value is in consistent spelling in the API, rather than in the comments. [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4 http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4 [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ugly-american-programmer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ugly-american-programmer/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538473 [3] https://developers.google.com/style/spelling https://developers.google.com/style/spelling [4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/157807/gb-english-or-us-english#comment49307_157835 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/157807/gb-english-or-us-...
• whiddershins 7y ago
  That's a good perspective to be reminded of. On another note, I think it's an interesting choice of words that you wrote "created." Languages and spellings weren't created at some point in the past. They evolved gradually and are still evolving. There's no principle stating that American and British spellings are forbidden to converge in the future.
  • rlonn 7y ago
    My girlfriend, who is from Britain, also tend to go on about how "british english" is the only correct english because "we invented the language". Not 100% serious of course, but subconsciously I think she believes it. She also dislikes it when swedish (us being in Sweden) borrows english words and changes the spelling or meaning. I think this attitude is a bit lazy or ignorant - people don't think about what a language is or how languages develop when they say something like this. All languages are thieving slaves of fashion that cut, copy and paste with abandon, continuously.
    • jacobush 7y ago
      Time to whip out: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
      • dbtx 7y ago
        Ah, but which English? I rather suspect it was the American variety that did the most of that. Because, you know, American tradition of rendering unconscious and emptying pockets, and all. It's a thing, here. On the topic of "words" "found in" pockets, they didn't harvest every single password I'd created for a handful of years because they didn't care about the USB drive-- just the bit of cash. I also had someone's CC# on a sticky note in my wallet, and they left it all on the ground. Amateurs.
  • wicket 7y ago
• electricslpnsld 7y ago
  > Apart from the US, British spelling differences are mostly followed by other countries where English is the main language too. Canadian English is a funny case here — it adheres to British (Zed) and American (tire with an i) customs by equal measure, but by and large Canadians sound closer to ‘mainstream’ Americans than they do to Brits. This is of course ignoring Quebec...