Interesting side note. OGRE3D was created by a British citizen and they chose to follow many British idiomatic spellings - such as Colour - one of the few libraries I have used which chose those spellings over US variants.
Probably because many of them were former English colonies.
> Probably because many of them were former English colonies.
The US was also a set of former English (well, British, most recently) colonies.
For comments I use British English, I wouldn't know how to write American grammar if I tried.
That was the moment I realised most of the api calls I'd been making used the American 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
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ugly-american-programmer/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538473
[3] https://developers.google.com/style/spelling
[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/157807/gb-english-or-us-...
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.
"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
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.
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...
Let's get this straight. There's "American English" used in the US and Canada. And then there English, where "colour" is spelled with a "U", and that's used in lot more countries, and natively spoken by more people than American English.
'Colour' and "Cheque' are spellings that are common in Canada.
Really? Are you talking about India? If so, I'm not sure what percentage of people have english as their mother tongue - I think it would be quite small. Also, I think indian english is about as dissimilar to british english as american english is.