A project at work recently reached an interesting crossroads where it had to be decided what the spelling convention should be for some code which the company’s partners would have to interact with. The use of English as a common language had been uncontroversial up to that point, but there had crept into the software words which had different spellings between American English (en_US) and British English (en_GB). As a passionate European, it made sense to me to choose the version of English spoken by the English, but the more I researched it, the more I realised that the correct international standard really was en_US. Perhaps the deciding factor for me was that the coding standard for the European Space Agency requires the use of en_US spelling, which I will mention below in my depressingly convincing argument for that same linguistic standard.
This may sound like the “ugly American programmer” problem, with one big country forcing their local standards on the world, but as that link explains, coding is an international activity and it needs an international standard, and, rightly or wrongly, that standard is American English, de facto.
Moreover, this standard is now a “de jure” standard, formalised in the coding standards of countless international projects:
- The Drupal coding standard says:
“Comments and names should use US English spelling (“color” not “colour” etc.).”
- The ActionScript coding standard says:
“Write method names in American English to avoid a mix of different languages and to ensure that every developer can read the method names properly.”
- The Symbian coding standard says:
“All names should be in English (US), because the reserved words of the programming language are in English, too. In addition, in an international organization, English is usually the only language everybody understands.”
- The Apache FOP project coding standard says:
“American English spelling should be used. … Some standard is useful, and American English is widely used and accepted for technology standards and projects.”
- Even the European Space Agency coding standard says (on page 6):
“Rule 22: Use American English for identifiers.”
It’s not just that integration would be difficult with a project that uses a different convention, it’s that we would be making our code harder for other people to understand if they were used to code with American English spelling. We can’t really expect a Russian programmer to write code like:
$colorPath = "display/colour"; // Remember that this particular partner uses British spelling
Also, our company is already using American English spelling because of the programming languages we use. For example, HTML has a “color” attribute, and PHP has functions to “normalize” values. So this is also a case of being consistent with ourselves. The changes would be relatively small, but I think worthwhile in the long run. Apart from “colour” and “enrolment” we would have to avoid “behaviour” and arguably “holiday” (“vacation”), but those are the only issues I can think of.
(The company did decide to “standardize” on en_US mostly because of my email. Should I have tried going one step further by suggesting we use Ido instead?)
