If PHP Were British (2011) | Hacker News Reader

If PHP Were British (2011)

aloneonahill.com

433 pointssusam364 comments

While this is obviously a (good) joke, the differences between cultures often become unexpectedly important in code.

I remember being about 13 and learning about OO code and reading Apple's (then excellent) developer documentation. It had an example of a class called "faucet" and lots of text related to American plumbing. At the time I had literally no idea what faucet meant (en_gb: tap) and spent about five times longer trying to understand the metaphor than the actual code. It really left a bitter taste in my mouth: I didn't have a clue what was going on, not because of inheritance or Obj-C, but entirely because I didn't understand what the author probably didn't realise was a culturally sorry metaphor.

I wondered why you didn't just google the meaning of the word like I would've done at that age, but then remembered that this was not a thing back in the days.

Also reminds me of when I was stuck in Lego Star Wars and couldn't find the way to solve a level. I then searched for a write-up of said level. At that point I only understood German, but I was still extremely confused by the write-up. The reason was, that the German word for 'hatch' is 'Luke', and Luke Skywalker was a character who was present in that level. I was stuck because I didn't find that hatch and the write-up told me that I 'jump on the platform with Luke and activate a control panel with R2-D2 to make Luke appear so that people can go through the Luke' (very paraphrased, but I think the point comes across)

Just pop in the Encarta CD and search

I'm too young to understand that reference :D My first OS was Windows XP and googling things was already pretty well established. Didn't know that Microsoft used to publish an encyclopedia, interesting!

Ooof, well I’ll go lie down for a bit I guess :)

Edit: The best windows OS after 95 ;)

I'm tired as well so I understand ;)

Windows XP was nice, yeah. Windows 7 as well, and I can tolerate Windows 10 for gaming. For everything else, the penguin does the job.

I never used 95, jumped straight from 3.11 to 98. I still think we should've stuck to 3.11, far fewer headaches.

It is silly, but even small things like foo and bar could be a barrier or distraction at least. At least I am thinking more about 'Why the heck foo and bar? Why?! Why not A or B or other more neutral and common? What could be the hidden meaning?...' than about the logic of the example.

I really dislike when people use foo and bar. Use something with some meaning imo.

That's the point, though; you use 'foo' and 'bar' when you want the reader to focus on an abstraction, instead of potentially distracting them with the details of a concrete situation.

Evidently the abstraction can also be the distraction.

Once the ‘programming bit’ is flipped in someone’s brain, I think metasyntactic variables like foo and bar become very instinctive and easy to reason about. You have activated the part of your brain that visualizes things as abstractions with placeholders.

The problem is when foo and bar are used in material aimed at beginning programmers who are still developing that instinct and who haven’t yet got that bit set.

For example - sometimes people get confused about what is meant by a "faucet," and so using "faucet" as a variable name could lead to confusion.

I think of a crowbar and martial arts. Ugh, it’s actually much more distracting than the serene A-B-C, X-Y-C, and so on.

Oh, it very much has meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR_(disambiguation)

Sorry to be nitpicking:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar

"Foobar

Not to be confused with FUBAR or Foobar2000."

It's linked from FUBAR but not under "disambiguation" but "See also".

Well, yeah. But also:

> It is possible that foobar is a playful allusion to the World War II-era military slang FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar

Which is certainly how I've always understood it.

It seems the "foo" didn't come from that, but once "foo" was in wide adoption, the "bar" likely suggested itself automatically to someone familiar with "fubar".

Yeah, I know, but obviously I mean meaning in relation to the context. :)

"Foo" and "bar" are hacker culture signifiers, like "yo" and "word up" are hip-hop culture signifiers. Even if you don't consider yourself a part of hacker culture, understanding its history and peculiar lingo is probably a good idea if you contribute to a site known as "Hacker News".

The Jargon File, though largely historical and obsolete, is a good place to start:

https://catb.org/esr/jargon/

Why does that site have a certificate (from LE) for "www.animadance.org"?

Have seen that happen on shared hosting before.

Yup. The point of an example is to let the learner leverage their intuition about one concept to guide their understanding of the other. It requires realistic examples. Nobody has useful intuition around what a "foo" is. It contradicts the very point of an example.

(It is useful to illustrate syntax, though!)

100% agreed. I get the point of it, I just think that it's useless in examples.

It comes from fubar, which stands for “fucked up beyond all recognition”. Foo and bar it seem so innocent and whimsical by comparison

"Foo" dates earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747944

https://catb.org/jargon/html/F/foo.html

It was probably paired with "bar" because of FUBAR though.

My dad referred to the figure known as the "impossible trident" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trident ) as a "foobar". It was used as a warning to engineering students to check their technical drawings.

I had a similar problem as a non-native English speaking teenager trying to learn how to code for the first time. The function in one of the challenges named sleepin(day, vacation) had to return true if the day was a Saturday and and vacation was true. I had no idea what that idiom meant and I think that significantly contributed to my struggle to learn coding as a beginner.

It's funny, I wrote it very much tongue-in-cheek of course, but as someone who grew up writing HTML and then CSS and using "color" all the time there's probably a little nugget of genuine pent-up irritation hidden in there somewhere.

The footnote for #1 is broken.

# isn't a pound sign, £ is a pound sign.

I see you've played poundy, spoony before.

Thank, fixed.

https://github.com/muan/spiffing

Oh you think that was bad? When I was that age my teachers were flagging to my parents that I kept switching between American and British spellings at random. Doing lots of programming in US English was causing my schoolwork to be frequently marked wrong (the teachers were fortunately quite forgiving about this type of mistake). It was just hard at that age to remember which of "color" and "colour" were correct in different contexts and ditto for a bunch of other words. Also for a brief period I thought the right way to write a zero was with a strikethrough because of the monospace fonts.

Other fun US/UK cultural issues: interview questions like "how many pingpong balls fit in a school bus". To Brits a school bus could be literally anything from a coach to a small vehicle, they aren't standardized like in the US. Even when you remember the big yellow buses from films, how big are they? If you never saw one in real life it's hard to imagine. Also it took a while before I figured out that "ping pong" meant table tennis. Fun times.

My early programming was on BBC Micro and some Acorn machines in school. There, the programming and documentation was all spelt correctly, from memory. "colour", "dialogue", "catalogue", and so on. It wasn't until I started on a PC that I got the Americanisation of computer stuff.

To this day, I still name things internally with the spellings I'm used to despite working in an international company (where it makes sense of course, not in a way that might lead to actual time wasted due to confusion.)

Table tennis is the name of the sport. Ping-pong is a brand of table tennis equipment.

Huh really. This is like with Hoover then, where the term became generic? I only ever heard ping-pong used as the name of the sport.

Another thing that confused me and lots of other British children: why do so many American program brand names begin with the apparently meaningless letters EZ? Eee-zed doesn't mean anything!

'EZ' is meant to be read as 'Easy', I think.

Yep. It's embarrassing how long it took a teenage me to figure that one out, though.

Hoover (vacuum), Xerox (copy), Flex (angle grinder), the bright yellow post it note (3m trademark), pretty funny stuff

I believe the confusion is over the letter Z. Commonwealth countries would pronounce that "zed" while in America that letter is pronounced "zee" (rhyming with letters like B, C, D, etc.).

EZ would be pronounced "easy".

And then there's things like million and billion being literal magnitudes different.

"England and America are two countries separated by a common language."

The long scale (million, milliard, billion, billiard) has been obsolete both officially and unofficially in Britain for decades.

So has the English system of measurements in the US :(

Which is tragic, because it's more correct mathematically.

I'm American, and I grew up with the short scale, so I always though it made obvious sense: every time you add a comma, you jump up. So 1,000,000 is a million, 1,000,000,000 is a billion.

But 10^9 is a billion and 10^12 is a trillion makes very little sense. I mean, I know it's 1,000 * 1,000^2 and 1,000 * 1,000^3, but it seems to make more sense to me to say that a million million is a billion, and a million million million is a trillion. So 1,000,000^2 and 1,000,000^3, with the bi and tri right there.

Still, that ship has long sailed, so 1,000 * 1,000^3 for a trillion it is.

I've been thinking we can un-sail that ship by getting explicit about which scale (when it's relevant).

Always "million", but any time you say "billion" say "long billion" or "short billion". If it catches on, after a sufficient period we can drop the "long" once everyone realizes that long is better (and gives us milliards and billiards).

We need more uses of long and short - a kilometer is a short mile, a kilogram is a long pound, etc.

Maybe? It's a little different in that with the numbers it actually disambiguates.

I still write a zero with a line through - I think it makes it very clear (with my terrible handwriting) that it is indeed a number!

In high school, circa 1980, there were a few of us who were into computers. In math class, one of us thought it would be cool to write zeros with slashes through them, because that is how our computers printed them. He got marked down on his homework because a zero with a slash through it meant the empty set. Context matters I suppose. I think there are enough clues in this comment that this was in the US, not the UK.

Busses aren't standardized here, either. I've certainlu seen vans used in rural areas.

Here's a fun story. I left academia right after my Ph.D and moved to London, where I started freelancing as a software developer. Naturally, I joined a coworking space, since I was new in town and wanted to meet people. This coworking space had a weekly social event where new members were introduced over drinks, and I was promptly asked to go on stage and introduce myself and say a few words about my professional background.

I hopped on stage and started talking about my Ph.D in cognitive neuroscience. I told them that I was studying how the attentional system is involved in conscious perception. To make it a bit more tangible, I asked everybody to close their eyes, and said "I've now been talking to you for a few minutes. With your eyes closed, I want you to tell me what color pants I'm wearing."

If you're British, you're likely roaring with laughter at this point. For the Americans: pants means underwear in the Queen's English.

We all had a jolly good laugh.

When a graduate student, I once shoved a sample into a -80 ºC freezer with a template on the front showing what everything was, written in pencil as an index (everything was stored in a metal rack in a particular position and they all looked identical from the top – it was a bit of a pain to find your sample if you didn't know where to look as you'd have to lift them all out and rummage). Someone had removed something and not removed its name from the index on the door, and I'd placed my sample in its place, let's say into spot H6.

I went around the corner and popped my head into the nearest office – a female (and conventionally attractive) American post-doc I didn't know terribly well was sitting there typing and I just said, "Hey, <name> do you have a rubber I could borrow in a hurry for just a moment? I'll bring it back in less than two minutes, promise!". She changed colour, burst out laughing, and handed me "an eraser"...

Oh man, that's a very unfortunate choice of words :'D

The etymology of faucet and tap is interesting (from Oxford online dictionary):

> late Middle English (denoting a bung for the vent hole of a cask, or a tap for drawing liquor from a container): from Old French fausset, from Provençal falset, from falsar ‘to bore’. The current sense dates from the mid 19th cent.

> Old English tæppa ‘peg for the vent-hole of a cask’, tæppian ‘provide (a cask) with a stopper’, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch tap and German, Zapfen (nouns).

Both had the same classical meaning from different origins, but the British chose the German/Dutch word while the Americans chose the French/Latin word.

> Both had the same classical meaning from different origins, but the British chose the German/Dutch word while the Americans chose the French/Latin word.

One of the most interesting books that I've read in a long time:

Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme--And Other Oddities of the English Language [0]

This gave me incredible insight into the formation of modern English. I read it voraciously. Very good book to understand why it's such a mess.

I bought it after hearing an interview with the author on a podcast.[1] I think anyone (English-speaking) who enjoys and appreciates language (and podcasts) will get a kick out of it. The author is passionate and excited by the topic, so very entertaining.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55332395-highly-irreg... [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...

At least OP didn't have to navigate disambiguating "gloryhole."

So what's the British English equivalent to 'gloryhole'?

Ps asking for a British friend

According to the OED, the use of faucet as a tap for drawing liquid out of something dates is attested as far back as 1400s - I'd consider that current sense (as does the OED).

I don't thing British "chose" a German/Dutch word, it was the native choice. We speak a Germanic language, though it has been quite influenced by French and Latin loan words. Faucet sounds like a much "posher" word to me, native British English speaker.

I think this is a common theme. British English has earthier words, American English seems to have fancier terms in a lot of cases - but sometimes it is reverse. Pot luck really, though I think AmE is the fancier one for general terms. The one that always sticks in my mind is the AmE "transmission", which is in BE, "gearbox". I wouldn't know what "transmission" means if someone hadn't told me, but I could have worked out what gearbox was from the fact it was talking about gears.

Hm. As an American, there's several gearboxes on my car but only one of them is the transmission.

Further, "transmission" refers to the thing sending power over the driveshaft. The RPM and torque are actually rather analogous to the frequency and amplitude of a radio wave rotating around a polar graph.

I didn't say it was an accurate name, but it is what we call it. Just like we call the "gas pedal" the accelerator. (which is obviously an example of the reverse - fancier word vs earthy word.)

There actually was a movement in British literature to favor Anglo-Saxon words that took hold after the American revolution.

Anglish, I know. It is, unfortunately, really fragmented and full of idiolects.

I find this interesting because I (and most Americans?) see BE as much more “posh” than AmE … I guess I’ll be looking out for actual word differences/etymologies more now

I remember there was a level called something like 'Open the Faucet' in WarioLand 2, and I was similarly confused

"culturally sorry metaphor" just because you cant understand doesnt make it "culturally sorry".

It took me ages to realise that "sandbox" meant sandpit. I didn't really think about the word, but I never made the link.

I'm not a native English speaker, but when I was explaining some basic programming to my English ex-girlfriend I mentioned "parenthesis" at some point, and she had no idea what they were. Turns out, they're "brackets" in British English; I didn't even know parenthesis is American English.

Even though I typically use British spelling and idioms I still prefer and use parenthesis because it's just clearer and less easily confused with square brackets.

She also kept typing "colour" and such in CSS. Since then I've always made sure "color" and "colour" both work whenever I add a setting of CLI for it. I wish the English-speaking folk could agree on a way to spell things; can you all maybe have a war over it or sort it out some other way?

I’m French and the similitude of a lot of words in British is problematic, because I’m never sure I’m not inventing words. Colour for example sounds like a misspell of “couleur” for me, whereas color feels more English. But maybe it’s just because I consume a lot more American media than British.

And then there's French Canadian and French French. I find it weird how a lot of English native speakers see them as 2 different languages, as if they were more different than the Texas and London English dialects. hint : nobody's gonna call you a muppet in Texas.

Seems there are some words seen as high level that a French would immediately recognise whereas the relaxed counterpart make no sense for him. Example : "facilitate". I’m French, this word sounds like horrible "franglais" for me but may look classy for an English (?).

> can you all maybe have a war over it or sort it out some other way?

The confusion stems mainly from the Norman conquest anyway so don't count on a war solving it.

We have 3 different sets of things on keyboards (well, us/western ones, anyway)...

() {} and []

Typically I've seen/read [] as 'brackets', () as 'parenthesis' and {} as 'curly brackets' or 'curly braces'.

So would UK folks use () as 'brackets' and [] as 'square brackets'?

There's also <>, which I (en-US) call "angle brackets".

Chevrons?

> So would UK folks use () as 'brackets' and [] as 'square brackets'?

Yes, exactly that.

> So would UK folks use () as 'brackets' and [] as 'square brackets'?

Yes; "round brackets" is also used, but typically just "brackets".

It's one of those words that exists in both variants of English but actually mean something different. "Pepper", "pants", "fanny" are also fun.

() Brackets, [] square brackets, {} curly brackets, and <> angle brackets were the terms I learned in Canada. Although I was always familiar with the word "paranthesis", it always felt foreign and unnecessarily formal and technical. I believe curly brackets are also known as "braces"?

I've never thought of "parentheses" as being a US-English term, after all we have the word "parenthetical"*. I'd agree "parentheses" is a bit technical compared to "brackets", but I'd certainly expect any native speaker to know what it meant.

*) Plus there's the very English joke, and no this isn't something generated by ChatGPT:

One day, Shakespeare and Marlowe encountered an elderly man with a very straight back and bandy legs. After the old man passed by, Shakespeare turned to his colleague and said: "Marlowe, if you were to include that man in your next play, how would you introduce him?"

Without any hesitation, Marlowe replied: "Lo! Here comes a venerable gent, his back is straight, though his legs are bent."

Marlowe then said: "Will, how would you put it?"

Shakespeare pondered a moment then suggested: "What manner of man is this, who wears his balls in parenthesis?""

This is a commonly cited problem with using IQ tests outside of their specifically applicable cases. They tend to assume a common world and then ask you questions about navigating that world, but not everybody lives in that world to start with.

Huh, I have done a lot of IQ tests in my life but none assumed a certain world view.

They were all abstract figures and a question like 'after figure A, B and C, which follows?', the answer to which was usually pretty obvious in a weird kinda way.

I've not seen any that made any reference to the real world.

My Psych 101 class decades ago covered it in more detail so I'm just speaking from very loose memory but just from some naive googling:

https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/newsletters/winter052/ https://www.iqtestcouncil.org/faq/are-iq-tests-culturally-bi... https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-a...

There might better sources than those, the first one in particular has a lot of its own cites.

My memory from class was a bit of a different angle than fairness which is what those talk about. The issue brought up there was that IQ tests were designed for the specific purpose of placing a corpus of students with varied prior education levels in the right grade. For that purpose it worked well: if you didn't do well on the English portion because your English is non-native and the school is charged with teaching you English, practically speaking we do need to send you back a grade because you need that specific skill and that's where you'll get it. But being non-native English doesn't mean that you're less intelligent, so the score isn't really applicable for measuring that basically unrelated thing. Despite the name, measuring intelligence isn't what it was for. I also vaguely remember it having story questions like "the left tap is cold water and the right tap is hot water, how much do you need to turn each to get 25% warm water" being asked of people that didn't have running water in their homes and that being a problem. But again don't lean too much into my memory, I could be remembering this all wrong.

I live in France. When trying to teach my kids some Ruby, I showed them how to use _puts_ to print stuff. That would always crack them up, as it sounds (in French pronunciation) just like a not so nice word.

In Quebec, it sounds mostly like the sound of a car horn :p

"POUT! POUT!"

C'est surtout utilise dans le jingle d'une rotisseries tres populaire : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvzukGgd5_Y

now imagine what it's like for natives of a different language. you stumbled over a single, rather specific keyword - they might have confusing or no associations at all with terms like for, switch, case, instance, compile, parse,... they might have a textbook in their language (or not), but the statements might feel like hieroglyphs or, worse, lead their mind in the wrong direction

When I was a kid I thought the Pascal language was a German programming language and Basic was English. This was because when I started with computers I got a book from my uncle about programming serial and parallel ports. The book was in Dutch but the Pascal code examples where commented in German and the Basic ones in English. And because all language keywords where just as foreign to me they might as well have been German in my mind. So I stuck with the Basic examples, which where “English”, because at least I had English lessons in school. Eventually I learned both languages where English and stuck with the Pascal examples because they where the more useful ones, and I learned a bit more German along the way to decipher the comments.

Also setcookie() and $_COOKIE need to be renamed to setbiscuit() and £_BISCUIT.

Just in case Americans are confused as to how us Brits distinguish

Definitely biscuits: https://www.abelandcole.co.uk/chocolate-chip-digestives-mr-o...

Obviously cookies: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/258025719

I hope things are clear now.

Now if someone could explain to me how a shit savoruy scone is a "biscuit" on your side of the pond... I'd appreciate it

Are those American biscuits like scones? I thought they were akin to dumplings. We really are "two countries separated by a common language".

(To be clear, these dumplings:

https://www.errenskitchen.com/suet-dumplings/

Not these dumplings:

https://omnivorescookbook.com/recipes/how-to-make-chinese-du... )

I believe they're essentially scones (though no sugar which I suppose is optional in a scone) but eaten like dumplings.

Dumplings are of course far superior. (And clotted cream & jam is a better way to eat a scone.)

Or the madness that is jam & then clotted cream…

That really does just objectively make less sense, I don't understand that debate - you don't try and apply butter to your sandwich after layering cheese and tomato or whatever, you spread the more solid thing first.

Yep. I don’t get it, and I’m sure the Cornish apologists will be here shortly to explain why it makes sense.

This is exactly why we should all support Cornish devolution.

Perhaps there is a culinary 3D printer than can print in 3D, jam and clotted cream.

Cornwall has to cling to it, because otherwise all they have is cornish pasties and incest

I live in Devon, so I'm compelled to agree. Cream goes first, no matter what the Cornish have to say on the matter. Although, apparently the late Queen preferred the Cornish method.

And why exactly should we listen to a German when it comes to these things?

I'm sure you only mean to be anti-royalist^, but the implication for the rest of the citizens by birth of this fairly multicultural country is extremely intolerant if not racist.

^Understanding that just makes it a baseless & lazy argument, a joke at best.

Jam spreads thinly and is less viscous, so is much more suited to a thinly spread layer across the surface.

Clotted cream is far thicker and lends itself to a big dollop on top which keeps its shape and does not run off the sides.

Why do people still question this obviously infallible logic?

Sir, if you're spreading your jam thinly then you are doing scones wrong.

How to pronounce scone is another divisive topic in itself.

Does it rhyme with gone or cone?

Linguists at Cambridge University have published a map of the regional variations:

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-app-maps-decli...

I've always pronounced scone as scone myself but my wife insists on saying scone as scone. Madness.

“Home to Scone” to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony.

I've never in my life heard someone say "Backend" instead of "Autumn"

There's a third common sound where it rhymes with "on": 1. /skɒn/ 2. /skoʊn/ 3. /skɑːn/

But I guess that also depends on how you pronounce gone, as to whether it rhymes with 1 or 3…

I make biscuits and scones regularly and yes, it's the same recipe minus sugar, which is similar to the suet dumplings recipe here EXCEPT you would not boil/poach a biscuit - that would make it a dumpling. I'd say it's more the method of cooking that defines a dumpling than the dough recipe - you could use biscuit dough but it doesn't have to be and often isn't.

Languages are fun. In Turkish,

Bisküvi (Biscuit): https://www.akakce.com/biskuvi/en-ucuz-ulker-potibor-800-gr-...

In German,

Kekse: https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/4360170...

Again in Turkish,

Kek: https://www.akakce.com/kek/en-ucuz-balocco-panettone-500-gr-...

But if it's a wet cake, then, "Pasta": https://www.carrefoursa.com/pastalar/c/1289

What you consider to be pasta is "makarna": https://www.carrefoursa.com/pastalar/c/1289

So, makarna/Macaroni is normally considered to be a sort of pasta, but in French there is,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaron

I love this madness :)

There's not just macarons but also macaroons which are a completely different type of cookie/biscuit.

In UK we have French macarons, but also macaroons ... which are one of two distinct types of biscuit, both with the same name -- one made of almond and one made of coconut, although the latter is more like a flat cake.

Those both in USA too, same spelling.

There are also Scottish macaroons, which are covered in chocolate and desiccated coconut: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=scottish+macaroons&t=h_&iax=images...

And in France they also have Macron to make matters even more complicated :)

Fun fact(1): The German word Kekse is a Germanization of the term "cakes". Although a biscuit isn't exactly a cake :)

(1) - At least I think it's funny :)

The term “cookie” literally means “little cake” from the Dutch “koekje”. The term “biscuit” comes from the French for “twice cooked (cake)”.

> ... a biscuit isn't exactly a cake...

Certainly not. By law. Biscuits are luxury goods, and as such are taxed appropriately, whereas cakes are essential food items, and have a lower tax rate. This culminated in a VAT tribunal in 1991 [0] where the makers of Jaffa Cakes argued that said items were cakes not biscuits, in order to get the lower tax rate. One of the winning arguments was that cakes go stale, while biscuits go soft. I think this could count as precedent for a proper legal definition of the difference between cakes and biscuits. (Of course, American-style cookies aren't biscuits either by this definition.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status

this is an underrated comment that explains the difference between cookie and biscuit in an unambiguous way

Biscuit - "twice baked" in French.

That would then be „Zwieback“ in German, which refers to a kind of crispy mildly sweet bread that children get fed when they are ill :)

Or Doppelback, a break type

This is one of those facepalm moments :-))

German also has Biskuit, but it's used for a kind of dough used to make cake sponges.

We (French speakers) call macaroni macaroni though. Although there is also the term "coudes", meaning "elbows".

Aha! Well, I got fooled by Wikipedia, which links to the French page "macaron" from the English Macaron page as its translation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaron

After I did follow the link, I saw my mistake :)

I think it is pretty clear - cookies are a doughier cake-like (but not risen) mixture containing egg, biscuits are just flour/sugar/butter.

> Now if someone could explain to me how a shit savoruy scone is a "biscuit" on your side of the pond

It may be because "scones and gravy" sounds like it would taste, well...British.

Don't get anybody started on the tax status of Jaffa cakes

(Sorry)

The system lords are gonna get really pissed if someone starts making cakes out of their jaffa.

Random observation: Tesco’s website reminds me so much of Costco brand and feel that I had to check if one owned the other.

For me, the best description I've been given comes down to the way that they are baked:

Cookies - Starts from a ball or blob, which spreads into a flattened shape during baking.

Biscuits - Starts from a shape cut from a flat rolled sheet, that mostly retains its shape during cooking.

Which would make biscuits "Plätzchen" in German.

I guess you're being sarcastic?

Based on the pictures, those look more or less the same to me...

No, they're very different, but I agree that the pictures look alike.

Very different, to the degree that if you were offered one and given the other you'd be confuse (but of course, you wouldn't vocalise it).

Sarcasm, if this is sarcasm, doesn't scale well across cultures, and especially not online, in addition, in text form :-)

That's if you're being sarcastic in addition to OP's original comment.

This is not sarcasm. I have a distinct idea in my head of what a cookie should generally look like, and it doesn't look like a biscuit. I can see the confusion, both have chocolate chips in and your classic digestive usually doesn't, but I'd put good money on my ability to identify one or the other

It's definitely sarcasm :) Most Brits would likely identify the first link as "cookies" too (based on their appearance at least)

The imperative mood of “set” feels impolite though.

Maybe something like wont_you_have_a_biscuit_please()?

Makes sense in the GDPR context.

Post-Brexit, GDPR is a dirty word in Britain though. It's part of the dreaded pan-European regulation that must be purged post haste.

So maybe it's:

  wont_you_please_have_this_delicious_guano_biscuit_imported_thanks_to_our_splendid_bilateral_trade_deal_with_vanuatu()

Does PHP have a limit on the length of a function name?

> Generally, such a limit is imposed by the threat of violence from other folks who interact with your code.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4565805/is-there-a-limit...

So no.

Though funny side note, there is a historic reason that function names are so inconsistent in PHP: The length of the name of a function was used for hashing. So you wanted a to vary the length to achieve a roughly even distribution of lengths.

https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691

> Post-Brexit, GDPR is a dirty word in Britain though.

Okay, UK GDPR. My sincere apologies.

Yeah, offer_biscuit() seems appropriate.

I was a bit disappointed to see that this article mostly fell back on the trope of British English being extremely verbose and indirect. I think a much more interesting counterfactual would be, If PHP Were Anglish.

"Anglish" is the name given to a kind of hobbyist-led reimagining of English that is as close as possible to modern English, but in a parallel universe where the 1066 invasion of England wasn't successful, and English didn't adopt a huge number of French words. https://wiki.anglish.info/wiki/Main_Leaf

Here are some English words used in computing that are derived from French, and their Anglish equivalents:

Binary | Twile

Clone | Betwin

Command | Bid, behest

Concurrent | Bytimely

Computer | Reckoner, arimer (from "rime" meaning "number")

Engine | Gearwork

Event | Happening

Multiprocessing | Manyworking

Polymorphism | Manishapliness

There are also quite a few words that are already Germanic with no French influence:

Backup, bandwidth, bit, bookmark, boot(strap), broadband, browser, bug, cookie, download, flash, framework, inbox, keyboard, laptop, mainframe, motherboard, online, output, root, runtime, shell, software, thread, web, wireless.

This is super interesting. As a native speaker I usually don't ponder on loan words / influences too much, but it is very thought provoking to see these "Anglish" alternatives.

Wouldn't it be easier to learn other Germanic languages such as Swedish if we had not loaned so many words from French?

- Band

- Mark

- Line

You know what? Compared to the bland and non-self-evident “protected”, “hereditary” is a remarkably apt name. I’m not sure the concept itself is that useful, but if you have to have it, why not.

As someone who has not done enough object oriented programing not to confuse "private" and "protected" on every occasion I would welcome this to all languages.

I actually tanked one of my first job interviews because I totally blanked out and forgot what the difference between private and protected was.

I just never used it in practice. And I still don't.

That actually comes in useful as soon as you write library code, but seldomly in application code (at least mine): You'd use protected for internal methods intended to be used, and probably overwritten, by children classes. This allows defining internal extension points to customise the behaviour of a class.

Take a response caching middleware, for example, that uses a CacheStrategy class to control the behaviour of the cache. There's an interface, so we can depend on it in the middleware:

  interface CacheStrategyInterface {
    public function shouldCache(Request $request, Response $response): bool;
  }

and there's a default implementation, shipping with the library, which works for 90% of use cases:

  class DefaultStrategy implements CacheStrategyInterface {
    public function shouldCache(Request $request, Response $response): bool {
      if ( ! $this->isMethodCachable($request)) {
        return false;
      }

      return $this->isSuccessful($response);
    }

    // This method can be modified by user code: Maybe they implemented 
    // an API with a `"success": false` in the response body, despite 
    // the status code? There's no way to know that, let alone provide a
    // configuration switch for every possible failure condition in user
    // code implementing our middleware.
    protected function isSuccessful(Response $response): bool {
      return $response->isSuccessful() || $response->isRedirection();
    }

    // This method shall not be modified: Whether an HTTP request may be
    // cached is defined by specification, not implementation.
    private function isMethodCachable(Request $request): bool {
      return $request->isMethodCacheable();
    }
  }

Users may extend this implementation, and override the `isSuccessful` method with their own implementation used to check whether a response handled by the app was actually successful (and thus should be added to the cache).

This method isn't significant from the outside of the class - it would add needless weight to the API contract of our library. But still, there's value in allowing users building their own caching strategy to override it with their own checks. Such an implementation might look like this:

  class CustomStrategy extends DefaultStrategy {
    protected function isSuccessful(Response $response): bool {
      return $response->body('success', false) === true;
    }
  }

There's no boilerplate here, no need to reimplement the whole shouldCache method, when only a single, granular, override is enough. And that is why protected can be helpful :)

(This was taken from a Laravel library I maintain. If you want to check the full example, see here: https://github.com/matchory/response-cache/blob/master/src/S...)

I tanked one by forgetting the syntax for a for-loop once. I hardly ever used it at the time since I mostly dealt with infinite iterators.

indeed, now protected sounds a bit dodgy, innit? always felt lost in translation with them oop lads

It missed another category of USA-centrics behaviour that infused in PHP: the dates. For instance, `mktime(hour, minute, second, month, day, year)`. I've never seen a country outside of North-America that puts the month first, though my experience is limited to a few dozens of countries across the world.

Unfortunately, other programming languages also think the USA format is the standard. Formatting dates with Golang relies on using the USA ordering. The more I use it, the more I despise it. I'm from Europe, but I'm so used to ISO dates that I need a small adjustment time to read European formatted dates.

At the start of my career after graduation, I needed to assume the role of a DNS administrator for Berkeley BIND running on SCO OpenServer.

I was encouraged by my ISP to use 20050101 (YYYYMMDD) as part of the zone serial number.

I have used that format ever since, especially because it will sort correctly without any special handling.

Americans have asked me why I write "2/12/2022" or "2 December" when "it's not pronounced that way".

Well, I pronounce it [the] 2nd of December. Just like they say "4th July!", but only for that single day.

It's ironic that Americans pronounce their independence day in British format.

I would suggest it’s completely intentional to pronounce “Fourth of July” differently to distinguish it from every other day.

Actually, Americans wouldn't say "fourth July" – that would likely connote "the fourth iteration of July" in some longer timespan (e.g. "In the fourth July of my adolescence").

"Fourth _of_ July" (or "July fourth") are the Americanisms here.

Given that they wrote “2nd of December” that was probably just a blunder.

In Britain we usually write "2 December" or "2nd December" even though it's spoken as "the second of December". The words are often slurred together, "the second've December" or "th'second've December"; "the thirtieth've April".

Actually pronouncing it carefully with a clear "of" emphasizes the date, either for clarity or because it's otherwise important.

My extended family is in Scotland while I'm naturalized here in the US.

Our wedding "save the date" notices caused a bit of confusion - they were published with 6/3/06 (Jun 6) and sent in Feb. From my uncles: "we'd love to come, but that's a bit short notice..." Oops. The formal invites had the dates spelled out.

> I'm from Europe, but I'm so used to ISO dates that I need a small adjustment time to read European formatted dates.

There is no “European format”. At least one country’s date format (in E) coincides with the simple ISO-8601 format.

Funnily enough, PHP actually taught me the Hebrew expression for "double colon", thanks to the infamous T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM.

http://phpsadness.com/sad/1

Well that is certainly unexpected, is there a story behind why a Hebrew term was chosen for this character?

Much of the PHP internals (the Zend Engine) was created by Israeli developers. I'm not sure why they didn't use English, but clearly they just used their native tongue in this case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zend_Engine

The ideology behind the extremely contemporary belief amongst brits that "s" is a British spelling is quite strange to me.

z is the British spelling and always has been, s is French and was lifted from French. And made wide-spread by British newspapers in the 60s+.

What is interesting in this case is this author goes all the way back to "connexion" without realising that contemporary to that spelling would be "specialize"

It’s not as clear cut as you make out. There are some specific verbs that should always take the ‘s’ in British English – for example, analyse (in American English, analyze). And then there are verbs that even in American English should always take the ‘s’, like revise and exercise.

I guess its mostly just amusing that cosmopolitans who are keen to appear "at home with everyone" display the same cultural parochialism as everyone else -- namely even doubling down on historical French spelling (over historical English) simply to avoid association with the US.

Similarly, of course, the scottish adopt historical englishisms; and so on, and so on.

With `z` however it's a project of those who'd claim to be above such.

There seems to be a perception in some that in cases where s and z are both officially valid (most of the time), that z is a vulgar Americanism (nasty pointy letter with a harsh sound, both of which stand out compared to the more refined smooth shape & sound of our lovely s!), when, as you point out, z is historically more correct in “proper” English. I don't think it is that they see s as english-english as such, but that they see z as american-english so go with s as an act of identity preservation.

I prefer -ise over -ize, I'm not sure why, maybe it fits better with how I pronounce/emphasise things when speaking. Though it isn't the case that either is more right in modern English: while -ize predates -ise, for about half a millennium it has been the case that both are valid so it is just down to preference.

Which ever you pick, just be consistent. There are some cases where one is considered valid and which one varies by variant of English, such as analyse/analyze, which is probably part of where the s-is-English comes from – applying a specific exception widely as if it were a rule.

There are a few things that many are convinced of about English which turn out to be quite false: the singular “they” being another one that has caused much discussion in recent years, or the not-splitting-infinitives thing which some are still determined to boldly hold on to.

Star Trek is solely and wholly responsible for the death of the unsplit infinitive.

TO BOLDLY GO? No, motherfuckers, you go boldly.

That's what you get when you take literary freedom and democratize it.

I will continue to defiantly split infinitives any time I like.

I've always understood the "rule" to be Greek-origin words take 'ize' and Latin-origin words take 'ise'. Personally I would rather have one or the other consistently.

I use 'ise' in all cases by default, but if I know my audience is American I use 'ize'. I'm not precious about it.

The z spelling is influenced by Greek, I believe. I think it's fair to say -ise is characteristically British, since it's widely used here and not in the U.S.

Nonzenze.

>Connexion was still the house style of The Times of London until the 1980s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English...

This is like trying to figure out what is more authentic pronunciation: /keltik/ or /seltik/ for C/Keltic.

According to Wikipedia[0], using "ise" is still the British spelling, as well as Australian spelling. However, the Oxford spelling of these words are using "ize".

After a customary search, I can't seem to find any sources that suggest using "ise" might be French, and made popular by British newspapers, besides the below Wikipedia article claiming newspapers using the "ise" spelling, instead of "ize". I'd love to see some sources on this if you have any.

I grew up in Britain, and have been spelling using the "ise" version, but since I've started working for a US company, I've started using "ize" everywhere since it's just easier. In addition, it's still accurate British, when using the Oxford spelling. Although, it did take me a while to get accustomed to changing my writing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

"Hello World" should obviously be "This is London calling"

Brilliant! Thank you for that.

Honestly, I've seen this thing multiple times over the last ten years and it's stupid.

EDIT: Yeah, go ahead and down vote me. I'm British and I find it stupid. It's a weird caricature and unfunny.

if it makes you feel any better, I agree it's pretty overplayed and lazy of a joke.

Clearly what's needed is a Malcolm Tucker version of this.

do_this{

  // try

} you_fucking_what (Disappointment £d){

  fuckety_bye()

}

If $AnyProgrammingLanguage was German, unary “not” operator would be postfix.

   if (something == null nicht) { … }

I think it would be more beautiful that that:

    If (something nicht null ==) { }

I.e. falls (etwas nicht null ist) { },

Why?

It's obviously the == that should be postfix.

  "Falls    etwas     nicht null ist"
    if    something    not  null ==

  Falls etwas     nicht gleich   null ist.
  if    something not   ==       null

  Falls etwas     nicht ungleich null ist.
  if    something not   !=       null

We all know that das Nichts nichtet (nothingness nothings; Heidegger), so it should be

    falls etwas nichtet

So, just a stack-based language?

To reflect the spirit of negating the meaning in simple sentences, not to follow exact grammatical order (but that’s also cool idea)

in Turkish too

if not something if something degilse

There was a formal proposal to adopt a German syntax for Scala:

https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala....

> Some users may have angst about typing characters such as ü and ß, but Odersky dismisses this idea: “Being completely unable to enter half the syntax on an English keyboard may make coding slower, but that never seemed to hold Scalaz back.”

Bravo Martin

That’s an April Fools joke, not a formal proposal

The "formal proposal" part was my December Fools joke.

Ah. My sarcasm detector was broken this morning!

``` const foo = await getFooAsync(); ```

``` Konst foo = auf bekommenFooAsynchron() warten; ```

Perl caught me off guard with this. We apparently had a programmer who liked to write

Statement unless x;

This did not make left to write code scanning me happy.

I have fractionally more sympathy for the post-conditional `if` - `statement if x;` - because at least then you're not trying to invert things at the end of a sentence.

Only fractionally because I hate all post-conditionals with a passion. They're the garden paths[1] of coding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Hum... The only thing that changes is that the exception comes on its negated form. It doesn't make code scanning any harder, or interpreting it any more convoluted.

Personally, I do hate both of those (including the Python's ternary operator). But there is something with the bashism it shares, of `do_it() or die "trying"` that looks quite nice.

Ruby has this. Can be surprising to read code ... "Wait.. What? Oh ok."

I like to do that in Ruby. It just reads so natural:

  $x = foo() unless $y > 10

As with any language feature, you can over-use it, but in general once I was used to it I missed it in every other programming language.

No-one has yet mentioned nonce.

Here in the UK, a nonce is "a slang term for a sex offender, especially one convicted of sexual offences against children."

Especially entertaining when it appears in WordPress plugin error messages. Last year I had to calm down a gentleman who was receiving errors when trying to post a comment which said something like "Illegal nonce detected" - he was quite distraught and thought someone was falsely accusing him of child molestation!

Thank you! I've heard that on a episode of Avenue 5 and it was confusing

"Release the pedophile!"

Indeed, in the British version of PHP we shall use "princeandrew" instead.

A long time ago I spent a large part of a year writing some woftware in Rexx [1] on an IBM 3090 mainframe. Rexx was designed by Mike Cowlishaw, who (like me) is British, and (from memory) the language included a few "Britishisms". For example it's keyword for selecting output text colour allowed "colour" as well as "color". It also used "say" to print text. Twenty year-old me was a little bemused.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx

I think DBASE III+ also used `SAY`

Postgres allows "EXPLAIN ANALYSE" as well as "EXPLAIN ANALYZE".

BBC BASIC accepts both COLOR and COLOUR as keywords.

https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/tutorial/chapter07.html

I actually prefer these:

  PHP, on the other hand, is full to bursting with abbreviations and acronyms which are entirely unnecessary:

  str_replace()
  is_int()
  var_dump()

  The following changes should improve things:

  string_replace()
  is_integer()
  variable_dump()

perl_regex_foo() might even be better than "preg" whereas everyone knows what regex means but "preg" isn't obvious at all. At this point who cares that it came from perl it should really just be regex_foo()

the "Perl" distinction is because they are PCRE (Perl-compatible Regular Expressions) - PHP used to* have ereg() and family, which used POSIX Regular Expressions.

* <5.3, 8 years ago

I think the main thing that needs to be included is a deliberate sense of vagueness and uncertainty around even the most basic propositions.

Instead of true or false or 1 or 0 values and = operators, British PHP should have constructions like "might very well be", "perhaps" and "not too sure about that"

Also needs a very advanced queuing system

With `perhaps` being a quantum superposition of 1 and 0, that collapses into a single value when used.

That's already been adopted in Python with its "Truthy" or "Falsy" values!

> Text speak" is unheard of on the streets of London, as the natural ingrained British grammarian simply refuses to stoop to sending messages of the "c u soon traffic kthxbye" variety

Come on now, the streets of London are full of nonsense like this: For example, the word "Aris" is often used to indicate the buttocks. This is the result of a double rhyme, starting with the original rough synonym "arse", which is rhymed with "bottle and glass", leading to "bottle". "Bottle" was then rhymed with "Aristotle" and truncated to "Aris"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang

I fear you may have fallen into a trap of reading those words without the humour they were intended to convey.

I get the joke and made my own

We may have different definitions of the word "joke" :P

Jesus christ.

Only the unwashed or criminal element will ever use rhyming slang - the whole point of its existence is obfuscation from police eavesdropping. I'll have you know, dear sir, that no respected member of the middle or upper classes should ever be found employing such bastardised lingo. The glorious Empire has no use for such trickery.

> Only the unwashed or criminal element

We're talking about PHP here, so yes.

Sir, I am confounded that you would seek to equate the noble vernacular present betwixt the fine men of industry in Our Great City, with that of the filthy street patois which serves only to tarnish the fine polish of gentlemanly character.

A rhyming slang version of PHP would balance things out. A new project for someone.

I loved traveling to the to the UK as an American. My only regret is that I din’t learn the language first.

So many of the things in London were slightly funny. Road and tube line/stop names (Piccadilly, Elephant & Castle), restaurants (Assault & Battery [fish & chips shop], Nicomsoup), the price of a doughnut and small coffee at Piccadilly (£7.40) and staggering, jet lagged, into a Piccadilly Circus Starbucks for a morning Butty.

This was also the trip that I played “Prounce That” with a group of Django developers.

What’s “Pronounce That”? Well, we noticed that we kept pronouncing things differently so we started taking turns writing down a common Python/Django package and saying “pronounce that”.

Psycho-PG was probably my favorite.

I remember talking to an American visiting the UK who was doubled over in laughter at all the signs everywhere saying "Way out".

I (an American) definitely mentally pronounce psycopg2 as "Psycho-PG."

Great article, also see https://www.citrine-lang.org it is a highly localized programming language

I submitted it for discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33829193

Not sure why this is so polite. I think you're more likely to get

the_fuck_you_want() { thats_right_keep_walking() }

I am definitely implementing would_you_mind/actually_i_do_mind structures.

Most of this could be implemented with the C preprocessor. Splendid.

I love this kind of humor.

Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? If someone would always talk like that I would seem very fake and off to me and make me very suspicious. The only times I expressed myself like that was in university application letters.

I wish someone would do a Scottish or Australian version of PHP complete with swear words. I'd pay good money for that (I have my Alexa set to Aussie, totally worth it).

no.

> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time?

The other side of the same humor is re-writing everything with "oi, c*nt, over here, you c****sucker"

Aaaand I think it's the same people :)

Some examples he used are never said. I would say something like "perchance" very rarely, and "Good morrow" never. "Would you mind", well I suppose we say this all the time.

However using "perchance" as "if" replacement is somewhat ingenious. Always be polite in your sourcecode. :D

They talk normally but the way they walk is very silly indeed:

https://youtu.be/eCLp7zodUiI

No. We really don't.

People who speak Received Pronunciation (RP) may speak more in this way (look up Jacob Rees-Mogg if you really want to see how stupid it sounds) but they are a small minority of the British people.

we definitely don't speak politely about Jacob Rees-Mogg

Hm? He's certainly the smartest and most skilled MP by far. A Victorian gentleman who invented a time-machine to travel 150 years in the future? Name one other MP who can match his genius.

I’m curious why you think RP sounds stupid.

He's confusing RP with how JRM speaks. JRM has entire layers of silly cosplay on top of RP.

Personally my go-to for RP would be Trevor McDonald.

I was more saying that one particular example (JRM) sounds stupid. I don't think this is a contentious issue.

However, RP can sound a bit silly with some pronunciations. The same is true with any accent.

P.S. I'm from Yorkshire so I'm used to accents being mocked.

How JRM speaks doesn’t bother me at all.

Must be an age thing.

What bothers me is the emergence over the last 10 or 15 years is the new London accent that was previously Thames Estaury in the 90s and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had.

The new accent is typified by -ah or -ar instead of -er.

The police recruitment adverts being the best example. Become a police office-aah instead of police office-er.

> and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had.

It wasn't really, though - it was just the first one you heard. Accents are always in flux.

(An interesting comparison for me is the Sex Pistols' car crash Bill Grundy interview against a modern London yoof accent. Major, major change just within my lifetime).

By bona fide London accent I mean that the way both sets of my grandparents spoke was different to each other in London and different again to their cousins that lived in Kent and Surrey. The Thames Estuary accent pretty much replaced the London accent and those of each of the Home Counties.

Sure, I get it. I'm not trying to be nitpicky (I swear!) I'm just trying to point out that the Elizabethan London accent, the Victorian London accent, and today's London accent are no less bona fide.

Interestingly JRM doesn't have any blue blood at all despite the whole 'honourable member for the early 19th century' persona, public image is a fascinating thing!

Isn't RP basically BBC-speak and thus a lot more widespread? Even if it's not the native accent of a lot of people.

Nah, it's a caricature of a particular class of Brit, mostly from a particular period. We do have different turns of phrase, some of which are very local even within Britain, but they're not all posh and polite, if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence

> if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence

I'd say the self-deprecating humour is also a mainstay of the Brits, encompassing almost all social classes. Granted, I'm not a Brit, but a former boss of mine (I'd also call him a friend) was a Brit and he checked all the stereotypes related to that. Really great guy.

They (the Brits) used to also be renowned for their black humour, at least around these parts of the European continent, but I feel that that is beginning to fade out (maybe it has become too culturally sensitive to joke about death? I wouldn't know)

Relevant: Stephen Fry explains the difference between British and American humour: https://youtu.be/8k2AbqTBxao

British people also talk like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg

I would imagine those are a subset, where some would be referred to locally as "chavs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav

Folks might note 'In the 2010 book Stab Proof Scarecrows by Lance Manley, it was surmised that "chav" was an abbreviation for "council housed and violent"'.

> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time?

No, no-one talks like that, and also "British people" don't really talk the same way even from one town to the next. There's not really any such thing as a "British accent".

You know how different a New Englander talks from a Texan? That's how different someone from Glasgow sounds compared to someone from Edinburgh, or someone from Manchester compared to someone from Birmingham.

I would say the difference between West Country, Home Counties, North East and Glasgow is significantly higher than the difference between most US States. Although that's presumably because we have had thousands of years to develop dialects and the US didn't have very long until TV, radio, telephone started mashing dialects from regions together.

I can tell the difference between New England and Florida but it isn't quite in the same league.

Accents in the UK aren't even consistent in the same place. My wife and I have different accents and grew up in the same medium large sized town.

Accents in the UK also have a strong class dimension. Middle class people often speak in a very different way to working class people from the same area.

The general pattern observed in linguistics is that accents/dialects/languages and language families have the greatest level of diversity in the area where they originated.

E.g. Austronesian is a huge language family that covers an enormous geographic area including Hawaii, the Philippines, Indonesia and even as far as Madagascar, and it contains over 1,000 distinct languages divided into 9 subfamilies - and yet all but one of those subfamilies are found exclusively in Taiwan, where proto-Austronesian first emerged roughly 5000 years ago.

Dunno if there is such a thing as "how British people talk".

Something that's struck me about the country is how much the way you talk reflects where you are from and your station in life. Like not just which region, there's frequently dialects/sociolects for different parts of a city.

The smallest dialect areas I know of are next-town/next-city. I'd be interested if you could give an example (email me if you like, see my profile)?

There are said to be multiple variations of the Liverpool ("Scouse") accent: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Scouse?lang=en

Brits will say that they don't but if you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything. There are a lot of other native speakers in the UK, for example from Australia or the USA, and you can instantly tell if this person is from the UK or Australia and it's not only the accent that gives away.

Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.

f you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything

Brits will kill me for this, but it's more of an European thing - the Brits just preserved it a bit more aggressively than others, because they never actually abolished the aristocratic system that generated it.

>it's more of an European thing

Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. You'll get much less unintentional smiles or politeness than in the UK.

> Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see.

Oh oh, "yes true", and your note confirms it... What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. So they are at the opposite end of that particular scale.

> What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy.

Well, I wasn't a big fan of it, but the reality of the matter is... for most of us, someone else destroyed our aristocracy (and all of our intelligentsia with it) for us.

Tbh a lot of the aristocratic address stuff that's still present in other languages is long gone from British English, except for people employed as butlers and people sarcastically mimicking the forms of address used by butlers. Even Americans are more likely to address people as "Sir" than Britons under pensionable age, and English hasn't had the polite second person pronoun most languages do for a long time, never mind involving a dilemma over whether to use a construction that would literally translate as "would your grace..." in everyday interactions to avoid people getting upset by the overfamiliarity of "you"!

We do love deliberate understatement, evasion and saying please a lot though!

British English has a very flat hierarchy, with no T/V distinction as found in French or Russian, and very little use of honorifics or titles (even for authority figures like university professors).

British politeness is not based on hierarchy, but based on (sometimes excessive) apologising for inconvenience.

No, it's a joke.

Source: I wrote it :)

> Do british people really talk that polite IRL all the time?

It's that or cockney. Those are literally your only options if you want anyone from the UK to understand you.

Nope. The telegraph (right wing paper for posh people) was losing its mind about London street slang a few months back (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/13/wagwan-street-sl...)

Do we heck. There are many different dialect and accents in the UK, but nobody talks like that (Apart from the 18th Century cosplayer, Jacob Rees Mogg, but thankfully we hear less from him nowadays)

Britain is a patchwork of different dialects and speech patterns with numerous class-based and regional variations. We don't all speak the same any more than Americans do.

"G'day Alexa." And I imagine she calls you a cunt once in a while, for good measure.

Well, sometimes you get a bit of the classic "you wot mate? Keep your gob shut or we'll have a barney, innit." Depends on circumstances, really.

"Shakespeare would be ashamed"

To be proper shakespearen, would

perchance() {} otherwise {}

not be

to be() {} or not to be {}

that is the question

be() || !be()

this would just run be() twice, if !be()

!be() <-> be() + be()?

I'm bad a philosophical math

but is that valid PHP?

True.

I don't know why, but this one made me chuckle:

would_you_mind { // Code here } actually_i_do_mind (Exception £e) { // Politely move on cheerio('Message'); }

Always amusing that when we try be overtly fancy, or Americans try to sound more English, we tend to latch onto things the language purloined from the French, such as nouveau. And purloin.

Please, using French borrow words to sound more cultured is so passe.

Careful there, you might be committing a faux pas.

I prefer to use ad hoc and sui generis Latin phrases to make myself seem more intelligent than I really am.

I love when French words are borrowed and repronounced so you end up with Grand Prix being "Grand Pricks" instead of "Gran pree".

You would so, so totally love how the residents of Versailles, Indiana, US, pronounce their town's name. I'm very 'Merican and it makes me want to bang my head into to a wall.

A number of city names become shibboleths themselves - things like Spokane being pronounced "spow cane" instead of being spoken as spokan.

Of course if you go back far enough, even the original place names of many places are simply "bastardized" versions of the original. It's how Latin becomes Italian over time.

As someone who learned on BBC basic, every time I do graphics programming I am mildly irked that APIs use "color" rather than "colour".

the amount of cool tips I see to help programmers save a couple characters in writing make me think if it were colour people would complain about the extra work.

I similarly never knew whether to use gray or grey. Fun fact, CSS, for one, supports both: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/named-color...

In new code, compromise with "coulor".

The would_you_mind {} actually_i_do_mind {} block cracked me up!

That’s the Canadian dollar sign though. You can tell because it’s worth a bit less.

I propose keep calm {} carry on {} for exception handling

It's more like this:

  blah = dosomeaction()
  bla > 0 innit? # Assertion

.....

  if read(blah) {
    return RES_NOT_TOO_BAD; # Everything's great
  }

....

  if !read(blah) {
      go Titsup("sorry mate, no such luck!") # exceptions
  }

  line(0,0,100,100, colour=GREY); # It's $##$%^ "COLOUR" damnit!!!! and G-R-E-Y!!!!

etc

That heading gave me a great idea for the PHP language maintainers/devs: Make your language support keywords depending on the locale of the system the interpreter/compiler runs on! Users will love this "feature"!

(I hope no one in their right mind takes this idea serious.)

Excel. At least kind of.

US: SUM(...) FR: BAGUETTE(...)

RU: СУММ(...)

For additional fun, the cell names still use Latin letters so you have to constantly switch your keyboard layout from Latin to Cyrillic to Latin back to Cyrillic back to... or pick the cells and ranges with your mouse.

Golly, I wonder why they didn't reuse this approach when they translated Excel to Japanese and Chinese.

"Sorry" as a default prefix

As with the "please" keyword in Intercal, the compiler would have to enforce its use but not over-use.

I think "sorry" should be a suffix and "excuse me" the prefix

I’ve gotta mention If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript, an excellently funny book, relevant to the thread. https://anguscroll.com/hemingway/

> PHP, on the other hand, is full to bursting with abbreviations and acronyms which are entirely unnecessary:

Consider Scheme, where even the ubiquitous `stdout` is `current-output-port`.

I can only wish the author of this article a good afternoon.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj9VljRQzCQ)

It's morning here, but thankyou all the same.

If a scripting language was to be from Cork, Ireland: https://adam-lynch.github.io/ked/

We could have a "use slang"; directive sort of like JS strict mode. When you declare a variable in this mode, it must be suffixed with "innit" like so;

>$my_variable = 5 innit;

Are there actually any genuinely UK-English-based programming languages? You'd think if anything (given the origin of the name) it'd be Python, but while as far as I can tell none of the keywords are specifically US-spelling, there are definitely function/field names in the standard library that are (certainly "color", "tokenizer", "capitalize" and "center" to pick a few).

I learned to code seriously using PHP so I have some fondness for it, and I believe it's been much improved since back then. But the "Fractal of bad design" post (from 2012 no less, so a year after this one) never fails to amuse:

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I started writing an includable file to make all of these functions work, but I can't figure out a way to override or replicated if/then as perchance/otherwise.

With something like string_replace() it's easy to simply write a new function and redirect the parameters.

Is it possible to replicate the way if/then works with other code; like not just a function but then a series of code blocks in braces?

I'm expecting merica-influenced languages to start using "wanna" instead of "try", and "axeme" instead of "input". Perhaps the use of "fanny" instead of "end", much to the roaring amusement of many.

  perchance (£condition) {
      // Code here
  } otherwise

I actually LOL, well done sir.

Dialects are pretty variable in Britain (no pun intended), this one seems to prefer old money English.

I learned some BCPL before I ever touched C, simply because the system I was working on came with a BCPL compiler and not a C one (it was CP/M). BCPL always seemed to have a certain Englishness to it which I only noticed when I came later to other languages of US origin.

If it were from South London, you might replace “sibling” with “bruv” and “true” with “believe”…

: ))

That's amazing.

I did consider suggesting replacing the semi-colon with "innit" at the end of each line, but it didn't really fit with the theme.

As a dual citizen living out in the colony, this looks like a great accompaniment to our local preferred language https://aussieplusplus.vercel.app/.

The worst part of being a British developer is having to go through someone elses code and find they used 'colour' all over the damn place. Just stick to how the rest of the world accepted the use of 'color' instead!

Colour is just fine.

A bit of local colour shows the code to be locally-sourced and sustainable.

(Well, with Britain's current political mess..."sustainable" may be stretching it.)

In a similar vein: Mark Rendle - The Worst Programming Language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcFBwt1nu2U

So Intellij has been getting super smart with their IDE's. I wonder if they could just add a visual display over this. Every "if" statement could be displayed as "perchance" etc.

The '$' being used in variable names I think originates from the word 'string', from when it was necessary to differentiate types of variable in the code. It never related to currency.

A bit like people who get annoyed by the word soccer, an English word originally to distinguish Association Football (soccer) from Rugby Football (rugger) and other codes.

Worth noting that this word also has class connotations, in that only toffs at Oxford called it soccer. Working class people never did.

My new favorite piss take of this debate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGVKVTcfy2E

I really think you shouldn't take the article, its conclusions and recommendations too serious.

You mean ... seriously?

I always assumed it originated with Perl, where $ is for scalars and @ for arrays.

I'm sure this use of $ character is much older than Perl.

One counter-example I know first hand: Sinclair ROM BASIC uses $ for denoting strings, in both variable and function names.

The one I have in a Spectrum is copyrighted 1982, around 5 years before first Perl was released.

I'm sure there are older examples like this.

You're right, seems like this usage goes back to at least 1964 in BASIC.

Isn't the else in an if-else-statement because of germans?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25406211

If PHP has “continue”, it should be “thank_you_sir_may_i_have_another”.

In practise it's just #$%#$% annoying to have to write "color" instead of the proper spelling. #@$#@^% you you bastardizers of the beautiful word "colour"! :-D

When I read this, I could hear Rule Britannia playing at the back of my head.

I will be right back, going to prepare some tea and biscuits... Cheerio!

Seeing all the long version function names makes me think the British would probably prefer Pascal over C.

You had me at perchance/otherwise.

Fucking brilliant!

Centre Center Colour Color Ize ise

These were very confusing to learn/ unlearn

The "monty php" comment is great!

Had myself a good old chuckle to this.

actually "hereditary" is more sound than "protected", innit? to some extent

die() -> rip()

exit() -> fuckoff()

Shit patter

I assume this is some kind of satire; but satire usually has some kind of point to make, and I don't get the point of this article.

Us regular human beings call this 'fun' if that's any help to you?

OK, well that's how I read it: a jokey article (i.e. fun) that looks like satire (something that bites), but without any actual satirical bite or point. But perhaps I'm wasn't sharp enough to get the satirical point. And I didn't see it explained in the comments.

If it's just ragging on PHP's deficiencies, (a) that's old-hat, and (b) most of what the author teases about isn't actually a problem with the language.

It's just the author's dry, tongue-in-cheek British humour. He's not really attacking anything – just a bit of fun using English instead of American English.

The author is British? OK, well I'm surprised. Nobody in Britain uses the kinds of phrases he makes fun of. I enjoy dry, tongue-in-cheek humour; it's my stock-in-trade (except when I might be talking to foreigners, like here on HN; it can easily misfire).

I read the author as being a non-British English speaker.

> The author is British?

What ho, old bean. Yes, I am.

Haha! Well, evidently I read it wrong!

> What ho, old bean.

That's Jeeves and Wooster. And that was itself a parody.

I use some archaic phrases; I refer to "chaps", some disgraceful act being "a bit off", my hat is my "titfer" (cockney rhyming slang hasn't been restricted to cockneys since the 50s). But I don't pretend to be an Edwardian bourgeois twit, like the ridiculous Rees-Mogg.

I'm sorry I didn't get your humour; it's a drag to have to explain a joke.

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