BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English | Hacker News Reader

BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

github.com

163 pointsOuterVale167 comments

Obliged to point out that "color" is how it's spelled in Latin, Old French, and therefore post-Norman English, that the superfluous "u" was added later by the English aristocracy because they were jealous of how fancy the newly-respelled French looked.

Obliged to point out that spelling is always an entirely cultural artefact, and that before colour was spelt color, it was spelt colos. There's nothing more correct about older forms, or newer forms, or any other forms. What matters is what is going to be clearest to your speech community and audience.

However, that is not the perspective of the creator of BritCSS, who refers to current CSS property names as "bastardised" spellings.

S/he's wrong, simple as that. "The particular spatio-temporal version of speech that I grew up with is correct, and all others are bastardised" is not a defensible or - frankly - interesting position. Chaucer would find virtually all modern English to be debased; Bede would wince at Chaucer's English; and so on, forever.

Nothing fruitful comes from cultivating arrogance towards the language of others. It is just as much a cherished part of their cultural inheritance as yours is to you.

It's a joke.

your wrong

Is that like "my bad"?

I find it ironic that you're making an argument about how language evolves in the same sentence that you insist on an awkward "s/he" instead of just using a singular "they" (or if you're Richard Stallman, whatever neopronoun he fancies, I forgot what it is)

there exists nothing else other than a she or a he. Executive Order was signed more than a month ago, have you not heard?

Buh-but what about muh egg prices?????!!!!111

And I find it totes ironical that you'd respond to a post advocating against language prescriptivism, and intolerance of other modes of speaking and writing, by trying to pick on variants you dislike. Point goes whoosh.

Also, I "insist" on nothing, you're the only one with a chip on your shoulder about pronouns here.

I mean, wouldn't the U.S as a nation essentially be a bastard child of Britain, and thusly use a bastardized English?

The colonies were acknowledged as the offspring of Britain .. the United States of America is more of a chosen fraternity of the emancipated offspring after they fled the control of their former legal guardians.

Strangely, it's the insular dialects across Britain that have become more bastardised over time. The North American English dialects are far more conservative when it comes to evolution. As this BBC article[1] says: "[...] although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer."

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20180207-how-americans...

I've heard more specifically the southern US dialect is probably closest. Not sure how deep or dirty in the south. I have about as hard a time understanding people with the US South accent as UK accents.

Wouldn’t that be Fitzenglish?

It's fair to assume that if a brit writes something online, it's highly likely to be a piss take joke. We just don't waste our time writing /s on the end of every sentence

It must be said that the Americans are rather well known for an inability to spot the satire and sarcasm that pervades our conversation here in Blighty!

yeah, but IME (as a british person) a lot of british people _do_ actually see it that way.

The transition in spelling from "colos" to "color" did not have anything with culture, but it has correctly reflected a change in the pronunciation of the word.

English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it.

So for the case of English, you are right that spelling is a cultural artefact, but not for the case of most languages, including Latin.

The oscillations in the spelling of Old French were caused by the fact that French had acquired some vowels that did not exist in Latin, e.g. front rounded vowels, so the French speakers did not know what Latin letters should be used to write them, and there existed no standardizing institution to choose some official spelling.

Spelling is in every case a cultural artefact, even for languages more phonetic than English. Such an orthography still needs to make choices about what distinctions to reflect in writing (e.g. should the orthography reflect regular and predictable allophony? voicing assimilation? final obstruent devoicing?) and there's no correct answer to this, there are only various trade-offs.

Colos to color was indeed part of a common sound change in early Latin (e.g. floses > flores), and led to new spelling, but many later substantive changes in Latin did not lead to any changes in spelling (e.g. the palatalisation of /k/ before front vowels). Similarly, English spelling used to change regularly to reflect changes in pronunciation, until Middle English, when it suddenly stopped and became largely fixed. And yet other languages continued to evolve orthographically after that point (e.g. major Czech spelling reforms in the 19th century). Why?

All of this is entirely cultural. In certain societies and at certain times, language users will prefer phonetic spellings, and in other societies and at other times they will prefer etymological ones. Sometimes spellings can evolve dramatically in a short span of time, at other times they seem eternal and utterly immovable. Language is deeply cultural.

The spelling of a word is one thing, the writing system of a language is another thing.

Of course, the writing system of each language is a cultural artefact, which differs from the writing systems of other languages for various historical reasons.

On the other hand, for most languages the spelling of a word is determined by uniform rules, which are the same for most words, with the possible exception of a small number of words, typically recent loanwords from other languages.

In such languages for most words the spelling is not a "cultural artefact", but it is determined by the rules of the writing system, which have nothing to do with that individual word.

Few if any languages have, like English, words that come from a great multitude of sources, where each source had different spelling rules, so that now, when seeing a written word, one cannot guess which spelling rules have been applied to it, unless one knows the history of that individual word.

How are spelling rules anything other than a cultural artefact? They are invented by a person or group of people and then agreed upon and implemented by a larger group. Then the rules are obeyed or not on a case by case basis by an even larger group of people. Arguably language itself is not a cultural artefact. But distinctions between languages and all attempts to describe or prescribe their use are.

> English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it.

That is true, but it's a trade-off made for other benefits. Why is there a silent "g" in "sign"? Because it provides semantic meaning - it preserves its connection to works like signatory, signature, significant, signal, etc. While English spelling doesn't always help you pronounce the word, it does help you identify its meaning. If it was spelled "sine" or "sin" (if you choose to also do away with silent "e"s in your spelling reform) that connection would be weakened or lost.

Also, this has a lot to do with the pronunciation of words changing over time and drifting out of sync with the spelling, but the spelling not changing to match the new pronunciation in order to preserve the aforementioned connection with similar words.

I don't know if the "g" in "sign" was pronounced at some point, but other silent letters today exist because the Norman scribes used them to indicate sounds that were in fact pronounced by the Anglo-Saxons at the time, such as the oft-maligned "ough" - a sound which has pretty much entirely disappeared from modern English (but as I understand can still be found in an extant distant relative: Dutch).

Does the dutch phrase "Acht en tachtig kleine kacheltje" contain a few "ough"? I am trying to figure out if your "ough" is like "ach", "och" or cough, rough, plough

Another fun fact... almost all "American spelling" came from Britain, i.e. variants that died out in Old Blighty in the 1800s. Accent as well. For the most part, they were the ones that changed!

There's more—the -ize spelling comes directly from the old Greek spelling. -ise and -re were forced-on/taken from French. The British like to taunt the French, but apparently have forgotten about the spelling thing, and criticize Americans (unknowingly) for not doing the same.

In short, don't take any crap from Brits on the subject, haha. Most of my chats with them happened during my backpacking days, before Wikipedia and so I was not able to explain at the time. I believed it too with no other information.

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

It’s a common misconception that American accents have changed less than British accents. Both accents have changed. There’s a pretty obvious example that American accents have changed in the fact that many American accents have vowel mergers that result in pronunciation mergers of syllables with different spellings that aren’t merged in non-American accents. Wikipedia gives the example odd-facade-thawed, which all rhyme in most American accents but which have completely different sounds in non-American accents.

Likewise some American accents have lost the distinction between the vowels in marry-Mary-merry, or merge the vowels in pin-pen.

If American accents had changed less then why would they continue to use spellings that no longer match pronunciation in their own accents but which do match in many non-American accents?

The reality is that both accent groups have diverged.

There are folks that do Shakespeare in the original accent, and it sounds modestly closer to the "average" American pronunciation than modern British.

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

Believe I saw a video on it on youtube or similar, where they have audio as well.

Presumably you're implying an average over British pronunciation also, but if you ask me that's even more of a leap than over the American.

Like the other chap said, it basically sounds like a West Country accent.

The idea that American spelling and pronunciation have a better heritage than British English is a compelling one, especially as the idea that Southern and Appalachian accents are closer to those of the Founding Fathers and Shakespearean English is a nice balance to the perception that these accents sound unintelligent and uneducated, but it's simply not true that one dialect has diverged more than another - both have diverged and in many cases substantially.

One of the common reasons given is that British accents like RP (there's a lot to criticise about RP but that's another topic), Cockney (featured elsewhere on the thread and the internet in general, oi m8 you got a loicence for that?), and general loss of rhoticity in BrE (and some AmE) accents that are most represented in American media have diverged substantially, but to me the examples of Shakespearean English in classic pronunciation sound closer to the West Country accents than they do any American accent. Note that there could be some bias here as the speakers are British, but you get features like H-dropping which simply don't exist in AmE. It also wouldn't be fair to say any modern accent sounds even remotely close to this.

Shakespearean English:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

Some good reddit threads on the matter:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ju72b/is_th...

https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/j3imwe/is_it_t...

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/9oke84/is_...

Another weird one is spelling, given that etymology and spelling is pretty interesting in general, at least up until the advent of the printing press. Both BrE and AmE have made some questionable decisions here. BrE standardised earlier and kept some Frenchisms like -ise (the OED maintains that -ize is correct with -ise being valid) but this was likely because -ise is correct for some words like advertise, or prise (which AmE dropped entirely for pry, and weirdly took up burglarize) and universal -ise makes spelling easier. In some cases it's just because words/pronunciations came much later from French in BrE whereas they came from Spanish and Italian in AmE. American spelling on the other hand was intentionally simplified, and although the spelling reform Webster wanted never truly happened (if it did you'd be speaking the American languaj) it did lead to the dropping of -our for -or, -re for -er, -oe for -e, etc.

I'm biased but I do prefer the etymological spelling, even if it means that we do say lieutenant differently.

“Better heritage” lol. Hardly.

It's additionally funny that in French, "ou" reads as [u], that is, approximately like the wovel in "fool" (cf "jour", "amour", "troubadour", etc). I wonder if it was actually pronounced like "coloor" at any time in the past.

Yes! Wiktionary gives one such Middle English pronunciation here:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colour#Middle_English

The second vowel, /uː/, is like in "true". (Note also the range of alternate spellings: colur, color, culur, coler, coloure, kolour.)

Obliged to point out that Latin -or words were often spelled with -or, -our, and -ur in Old French also. If you are using Wiktionary as a source you have to click through to the Old French definitions to see the alternate forms, as well as parsing the descendant table to see the derived forms that the simple etymology blurb often leaves out. Doing so you can also see that Middle Dutch has 'coleur' (modern kleur) which very likely did not originate from Middle French given the timeframe.

The earliest quotations for colour in the Oxford English Dictionary are from around 1300 where it was spelled 'colur' (cf Welsh) which while being post-Norman England is not post-Norman English. For Norman/Angevin-England the OED also has a quotation for honour as 'onur' listed as before 1200 (and again as 'onour' from around 1300). If you want to make a case of superfluous 'u's being added a better example would be something like chancellor, where the 'u' was added in Middle English and then later removed, rather than colour (or honour) where the 'u's have existed since the earliest quotations. The reason color and honor stuck about in English is most likely because that is how they were spelled in Latin.

However I think that when Americans brought it back they missed opportunity to get rid of 'c' and put 'k' there instead. Is 'c' even used in English language? It usually is just 'k' or 's'.

Usually, but not always. Here you go—'cinch'. Could replace the first 'c' with s, but the second instance would be a little more difficult, as 'sh' has a softer pronunciation than 'ch' here, which itself is not as hard as 'j' (emoji) or 'ge' (rage).

Hmm yes I forgot about č case.

Webster and a few other folks tried. It just didn't stick.

In Old English, ‘c’ was always hard and the soft sound used ‘s’. ‘K’ was not used or at least not common. We got the mixed up ‘c’ sounds with the Norman French influence.

How does modern French spell it?

HTTP had the right idea, just get the spelling completely wrong so everyone gets equally pissed off.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

Hilarious. I feel like referer looks correct now, having seen it so often.

Except now there's also the "Referrer-Policy" header, which is spelled correctly. I wonder if the spec committee debated calling it Referer-Policy for consistency.

Personally, I would have, since it refers to the Referer header it seems like it should follow the same spelling.

It would be like CSS having a "color" attribute, but then doing something like "default-colour".

It’s actually more like CSS having a “colr” attribute and then doing something like “default-color”.

I think that depends on whether or not you consider 'color' to be the correct spelling? :)

Guess you're not British then :)

Exactly, a Referer on the web is its own thing now. Referrer should be considered a typo if you’re referring to the Referer header.

They are paving a way to release a third spelling in the next update :p

If they just spelled it Refera, they could save another byte.

Reefa

Why does the author use `initialize` for a function name in the source code? I question their purity of intentions!

Filthy non-OED user. The author is probably a Cambridge dictionary person!

Seriously, -ize endings in the Cambridge spelling tradition relies on you knowing the etymology of the word, and if it’s from the Ancient Greek, that’s the one you use. Otherwise -ise for French or Latin words.

Isn't this the Oxford way? I'm not sure what Cambridge does.

It is indeed the Oxford way to be unsure what Cambridge does.

Calling British English (also known as just English) 'non-American English' is like calling an original a 'non-duplicate'.

American is basically English with typos, bad grammar, and bad style.

Somebody must be remarkably thin skinned and with a poor sense of humour (the kind spelt with a 'U') to have downvoted you!

I like and endorse Webster's reforms (-or, -er, -ize). Why write the French way? What have the Normans ever done for us? Apart from the legal system, chivalry, heraldry, and centuries of low-key class warfare.

> What have the Normans ever done for us? Apart from the legal system, chivalry, heraldry, and centuries of low-key class warfare.

And the abolition of slavery in England - not of great benefit to the rest of the world I suppose.

Some of the evolution of parliamentary democracy?

Low key class warfare is better than the high key version - look at the French revolution and the like!

Well if the British invented something for once they can spell that thing with extra letters.

English is basically a random mix of half a dozen languages with typos, bad grammar and bad style. All of its dialects have ridiculous spelling.

> American is basically English with typos, bad grammar, and bad style.

In that sense, english is basically bastardized old norse.

Hallelujah

Reading the comments makes me realise that a library for fixing the ability (or non-ability, I should say) to recognise (British) humour should be next on the list.

The man who got really pissed off by complete disconnection between spelling and pronunciation of words in English was George Bernard Shaw. Throughout his life he was an avid critic of the latin alphabet that was (and still is) used to represent spoken words.

He was so frustrated that shortly before his death in 1950 Shaw put the creation of a new alphabet in his will backed by grant in aid. And thus the Shavian alphabet was born. Enjoy:

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

- https://youtu.be/D66LrlotvCA

Not enjoyable to me. It elevates the pronunciation that Shaw used into the status of the one true English and marginalises any other spoken variants, dialects all over the globe. This is presumptuous and unfair.

How about this (equally unworkable) idea to achieve the goal of fixing the disconnect: instead of reforming the spelling, reform the pronunciation. Keep the writing as it is, but pronounce it to the rules (mostly: the letter/multigraph to phoneme map) which you find naturally in the majority of the other languages that use the Latin script. One can argue over the precise details and exceptions.

The good: it makes English much more regular and amenable to learners, all English speakers more or less affected in the same way The bad: the change is drastic so that movies from the time before reform need subtitles, pronunciation will start drifting apart soon and undo the reform efforts quickly

While I agree with you I can’t imagine reforming the pronunciation of - say - “Ought to cough and hiccough through the ploughing drought”.

Who would have thought there were so many tough pronunciations, though? They're all weird, but hiccough reigns soughreme.

Edit for thoroughness

I bought the Shavian Alphabet version of Pride And Prejudice. I've never gotten around to reading it but my partner managed to get through chapter 1.

Americans really don't get irony do they.

No, but they do get mad

Only if we're served tuna and beans on a "jacket potato."

Tuna or beans. Not both, you madman

Socks in sandals my guy.

Are you talking about Germany? Poland?

> Fixes CSS to use non-bastardised spellings

The last thing I need a tool to do is to spread divisiveness.

Then learn tò speak proper English!

We prefer 'Free' English over your King's English, thank you very much.

Not the best day for Americans to chide others about having a king.

Ouch! Only because the truth hurts :(

Where's the LOICENCE.md? Is it MIT? If only there were an Oxford License.

e: speling correction ;)

There is BSD and Berkley was an English philosopher…but ironically only if the external world exists.

Anglo-Irish, born in County Kilkenny, Ireland.

The Berkeleys were and are English nobility.

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

It’s “licence” with a C in British English.

Fixed, thanks!

And then a LAHHSUNSE.md for US readers.

This should be paired with British PHP ( https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/ )

I have nothing but good things to say about the author of that piece.

1. All of this could have been avoided but for the want of some MPs for some colonies. But no.

2. "License: Not Specified" instead of "Licence: Not Specified"

Speaking as a non-native English speaker, I'm not sure how I feel about American imperialism replacing British imperialism in general, but as far as English spelling and phonology goes, god bless America.

Both British and American English spellings are objectively incorrect. The only reason anyone believes them to be correct is that teachers in both countries have joined a cabal to play a mass prank on their pupils. Any second now, they will reveal that it was all just a big joke.

There's no such thing as "objectively correct" when it comes to this matter.

Now, I'll agree wholeheartedly that English orthography is atrocious in general, regardless of which flavor you pick. American one is a tad simpler, though, and that's all I meant by my comment. Ditto phonology - English in general is phonologically rather complicated for non-native speakers, especially due to its many vowels that often don't map neatly to the more conventional vowel systems. But, again, GA vowel setup is slightly less complicated.

Are you trying to tell me that the British gentleman Sir Tim Berners-Lee misspelled all these things when they went into the spec that CSS was based from?

\s (sort of)

Tim?

CSS was created by Håkon Wium Lie (norwegian) and Bert Bos (dutch).

Before CSS, HTML tags had color attributes, not colour attributes.

Sorry, I guess i cant understand sarcasm

Kind of funny the animus the author has against US spellings. It's nothing but shade to refer to US spellings as 'simplified' and UK spellings as 'traditional', regardless of the merit of the argument for doing so.

I can't imagine anyone will really need to use this, but it seems to have let the author work out some issues.

I think it's a play on the Chinese language having Traditional/ Simplified versions. I'm choosing to take this repo as tongue-in-cheek, which is hard to really determine online...

I want to see it as tongue-in-cheek as well, but, I feel like that's a stretch...what would be the humor in that? But even if it doesn't make sense to me, I prefer your interpretation of motive.

Look as a Brit let me reassure that it is a joke. No one thinks American English is simpler than British English.

Arr, only pirrates have trru spellingg LC_ALL=en_PR

I guess ninjas also since they use pirate spelling as well.

Puerto Rican English? Does it differ that much from mainland US variety?

The funny thing about references to Traditional Chinese (HK and Taiwan) and Simplified Chinese is that there’s even more shade in Chinese…

簡體字（简体字）Simplified characters

繁體字（繁体字）Complicated characters

Spoken like someone who hasn't had their code fail because they spelt words correctly ;)

This comment is perfect for being equal amounts 'lol' and 'grrr'.

I second that animus.

An example I had to endure in Britain recently was bus adverts for an Apple movie starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney called “WOLFS”. At first I thought I must not be seeing an apostrophe… but then… the horror.

For speakers of English (simplified) who can’t understand, the plural of wolf is wolves.

It’s the same in both, it was deliberate. Wikipedia lists a potential reason.

> The title “Wolfs”, a grammatically incorrect plural of Wolf, is an apparent reference to the character of Winston Wolfe (aka “Mr Wolf”) - an iconic “fixer” in the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfs_(film)

I don’t buy it.

Well do you talk about Nissan Leafs, or Nissan Leaves? I'd probably use the former

I can’t say I often have cause to talk about multiple Nissans. Plus the car is called a Leaf.

Regardless of who is correct or not, the bus advert to me as a British person reads and scans as a spelling mistake or grammar error. Googling to find they’re allegedly talking about Winston Wolfe doesn’t remedy that problem. Plus that would be Wolfes.

It reads as a mistake to me as an American too, and I expect most of us. It’s an artistic choice.

I came to highlight the similarities to Spiffing (https://github.com/visualidiot/Spiffing) but I note that the author already did that.

Always funny to poke a little fun at ourselves.

I do like Spiffing's !please keyword.

I believe that some people's actual full-time job is to translate software from US English to British English. I wonder what that job feels like after the thousandth time you've replaced color with colour and neighbor with neighbour

Correcting the number/date formatting will probably be the more challenging, yet still boring, Job, I guess.

The AI revolution will take care of that job

Will it? Even when told to specifically use correct British English, LLMs make occasional mistakes and also get too eager and use it in code like CSS. With careful prompting, you can probably get pretty decent results with Claude or ChatGPT but it isn't perfect yet. I'm afraid that America has won another battle in this war.

As a programmer working in the UK I've never been asked to rewrite something into British English. I have been instructed to convert some old codebase to American spellings to "avoid confusion". Probably about 6 times in 20 years of professional programming and usually by some product manager based in San José following an acquisition. This is why the library exists I expect.

To be clear, I don't think the library would actually be used to accomplish this task. Rather I suspect a tounge in cheek reaction to years of tedious spelling adjustment disguised as urgent feature requests.

I've been dodging requests to "fix" British date formats in published articles to meet US reader expectations for a while now ...

Don't get me started on US calendars that have the weeks beginning on Sunday instead of Monday!

YYYY-MM-DD should aggravate everyone equally, switch to that

That's localisation

At this point it seems we have two separate languages American and English and I say it as a non native speaker.

Wach an US movie, then watch a British movie. Compare TV shows, compare news articles.

Then drop the words fanny and rubber into conversations with each for some puzzled expressions.

Ironically, you'd use an American rubber with a British fanny.

Technically, you could use an American rubber with an American fanny too.

I'd say its more of a cultural thing than a language thing

What a shock to suddenly have proper English where up to now only the slang parody reigned supreme.

Canadian friendly!

Does it support 'grey'

No need, vanilla CSS already accepts either spelling.

wx got it right: https://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.2/classwx_colour.html

Next we need JS and CSS keywords in Esperanto, so that we're not privileging English-speaking regions over others.

Right, so this is a way to bend the world to your will.

The reason css properties have a standardized spelling is not to make fun of british spelling, but to have a standard that everyone could follow for interopabilitys sake.

If youre such a british language purist that you go this route, you will need to port/retrofit this hack to your future projects or you will once more have to debug why ”colour” doesnt do anything in your css declaration.

This is anti progression and a non-solution.

In addition, running this hack on the client side (really, why??) has additional downsides as color wont render right until after page load.

A solution for this non-issue would be scss preprocessor variable, something like this:

    $colour = ”color”

    table {
        $colour: red;
    }

TLDR: css is a standard, so learn it and work with it, not against it.

It's just a bit of fun, it's not meant to be taken seriously. On the other hand, R supports both British and American spellings, and I've never seen anyone confused by it.

https://bookdown.org/yih_huynh/Guide-to-R-Book/trouble.html#...

The British Empire ruined the English language.

bit mental that they didnt release this on chewsday

Or toosday for the US

"Fixes"

Yes, fixes.

No, it sorts it.

Sorts it, right proper.

CSS it, say it, sorted.

This creates a second language where two dialects that have minor differences meaning stackoverflow code won’t always work, nor will code you extract from other websites. This creates a mess, all while adding a JavaScript pre-processor that is prone to have errors, vulnerabilities and other flaws from the NPM hellscape. No thanks.

I mean, yes but this is also a joke.

Absolutely terrible. You should spell everything in American English when programming as like it or not the standard in every codebase and programming language going to be this. I am British but coding is not language, and trying to be clever like this is incredibly counterproductive especially in a diverse team. If you want British English to be used why shouldn’t the German on your team be able to use their language for example.

If everyone was just aiming for consistency we would be better off than following developer whims. We should aim to get over our personal preferences and try to be consistent and that means not having an ego about American vs British English.

HN. Never change!

Not every codebase. OpenStreetMap uses British English, for example.

I'm english, my team is english. We use english spelling throughout.

I'm not switching to american spelling to appease americans who aren't reading my code, in the same way as I'm not programming in french either

So you’d advocate that codebases should be written in the locale of the people writing them? What about open source projects, should they be dictated by the first language of the creator in most cases?

You presumably can’t use British English for the standard library calls so now you have a mixture of languages which to me is pointless and more about the ego of the people writing things. I’m just in favour of consistency which unfortunately you cannot achieve unless you’re wrapping americanised standard library calls with true English equivalents.

If you were coming to a codebase that defined American English as the standard I’m certain you wouldn’t change it. Why then when the underlying language makes that choice for you do you feel good about ignoring that?

The belief that only the US'ian way of doing things is correct is curiously prevalent on the other side of the pond to a level that borders on arrogance.

All I’m saying is keep your codebase consistent with the language the standard library of the coding language you’re using. If there was a programming language with British spelling without the use of awful hacks I’d be fine with that. Unfortunately most languages use American English, deviation from this means mixing languages and debate, therefore I’d consider it bad practice in almost every case.

Why would you assume that the open source project in question would be written in US english?

Hell, why assume that the project even be written in english at all? There's more non-english speakers in the world than english speakers

Because if you want your project to be well used and contributed to you’re probably writing it in English. I don’t see too many French or Arabic or Chinese or British English open source projects that have taken off, but I’m happy to be proven wrong…

Even large open source projects built in China like Ant Design have documentation and interfaces in American English because even if you don’t like it it’s the correct decision to not needlessly buck against patterns laid down in the programming environment you’re working in.

> So you’d advocate that codebases should be written in the locale of the people writing them? What about open source projects, should they be dictated by the first language of the creator in most cases?

Yes. I'm the one writing the code and I can use whatever bloody spelling I damn well prefer. If someone else takes over then they're writing the code and they can use whatever spelling they want.

Trying to enforce some particular detail like spelling or whatnot for all of "open source" is just eyerolling. Use what you prefer and leave the rest alone. It's that simple.

"So you’d advocate that codebases should be written in the locale of the people writing them?"

That's unavoidable, to some degree. You can be a programmer who doesn't speak English particularly well. You can write code about a domain that lacks English terms (e.g. you're writing code for a government in Norway — there will be words in your code that lack English equivalents).

Why should a team in China spell out everything in English if very few (if any) English speakers will ever see that code, and if a lot of the people on the team don't speak English well? Just because the language has keywords like "if" or "function"?

TBH most programming languages' alleged "English" is their own weird dialect anyway. Take Ruby's "include?" (should be includes?, and yes I have read the rationale), for example, or the eternal weirdness that is C++ ("deque" ain't no country I've ever heard of). If you're going to fixate on doing the same as the stdlib then you're just laying down rakes in your own path.

Why not both? https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/reference/summarise.html#:~:text...

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