Queues would also be ubiquitous. Data could not be accessed in order, but would have to be retrieved from an unordered queue, which would necessarily involve a long wait.

There would also be a congestion charge for drivers at certain hours of the day and interfacing with Rails would cause unexpected delays.

What is that? Do you mean a regular, non-priority, queue?

http://www.wxpython.org/docs/api/wx.Colour-class.html

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/manual/bbckey1.html#colou...

Yes, BBC as in British Broadcasting Corporation.

I wonder, though, as fun as it is to think about these jokes, what serious implications it had. Let's say, for example, it actually had been started with variables using a £ rather than $, would it have made any difference at all?

Color colour = new Color();

To me, it makes perfect sense, and tbh didn't realise I was even doing it. I definitely endorse everyone standardising on American spelling though, now its been pointed out to me.

Amusingly enough, (though not strange, if you consider its origins) Haskell uses the British spelling. Off the top of my head, the colour types are defined in the Data.Colour module.

http://ontwik.com/haskell/simon-peyton-jones-a-taste-of-hask...

I don't know if this is the one you meant, but I watched it a while ago and I think it's well worth the time: SPJ is great to listen to and you actually pick up a good amount Haskell and functional concepts.

However, at this point, I actually can't remember which spelling is which. I have to look it up. 'a' is the American one, right? (gosh, I hope I'm right)

It may not be limited to natural vs programming language though. I also have no issue daily switching between 0-indexed and 1-indexed languages, but I hear an endless stream of complaints about the latter language from people who insist they can't do that.

See also: Literate programming, or - more recently - Domain Driven Design (In particular: Ubiquitous language).

</old_fart>

Now, though, things have clicked and I find I can very easily switch between color and colour when needed.

Even to the point that if I'm typing on a US based site, I tend to use color (and Americanized spellings), and on non-US sites I tend to British spelling. Can take a while to get used to though.

Anywhoo, I loved this blog post :) Especially the:

Words fail me at this point. How is any self-respecting gentleman expected to make head or tail of these "words". It beggars belief that anyone could allow such distortions of words to be entered into a programming language. They, along with the myriad of similar errors, should be reverted to their proper forms immediately:

Bit!

I cannot see £ sign on my keyboard, so that would be slightly inconvenient. :)

I think that had more to do with the $ usage in Perl rather than with currencies.

How about you press $ eight times - that gives you five £s and then you hit backspace four times leaving you with one £.

$oranges = "lemons" innit!

    alright ar kid?
      im not being funny but x = y
      z is like 10 * 10 int it
      
      you got a spare minute?
         can you just do this for us
            // codage
         while im sorting this out
            // conditionage
      ta son

      if /*function*/ is acting the goat
          bloody_nora (error)
      
      summat wrong? nah : damn fucking right flower

£ would require the use of the middle finger.

To British sensibilities, it would mean swearing at PHP on every variable declaration! Actually, that said...

The first time I ever stepped into ERB, typing <% was a chore, since it was just a bit further than I had been used to typing tag characters. For en_US Americans on OS X, the £ character is a simple Option+3 though. Can anyone tell me what the key combination for the character is on en_US Windows platforms?

And the tall Enter key - uggh, why? Even if you need an extra key because of the pound symbol, you could just put it where the backslash/pipe key normally goes, instead of having a misshapen Enter key. And swapping " and @ - completely nonsensical. ' and " should be on the same key.

Putting double-quote above "2" makes perfect sense if you've ever looked at an ASCII table. A lot of 8-bit micro-computers did that, even in America - for example, the Apple II.

Seems kind of pointless. If you're going to include some extra keys, how about a few Greek letters, or accented English letters (without AltGr)? Of course, that's not to say there aren't pointless keys on the US English keyboard (what the hell is "`" for?).

> Putting double-quote above "2" makes perfect sense if you've ever looked at an ASCII table.

But there's no reason to base the keyboard layout on ASCII tables. The keyboard should be designed to be as intuitive as possible, rather than staying true to some obscure technical details.

If you think hitting the huge left shift button is hard then imagine how hard it is for someone used to a British keyboard to hit enter on an american keyboard.

Not too difficult, I'd say, because you can just move your right pinky directly to the right from the home position and you're good to go. The problem with the British Enter key is that it's tall instead of wide, so you have to reach even further to the right. I don't see any benefit to the increased height, because I'm always going to hit the Enter key from the home position anyway.

It's a similar issue with having the backslash/pipe key next to the left Shift. I move my left pinky down and a little to the left to hit the left Shift, but instead there's a backslash/pipe key there, which means I have to move it even more to the left, which is just uncomfortable.

(Nitpick: "socialize" is the original spelling; "socialise" was a change in spelling on our side of the pond.)

I blame my high-school English teacher.

But then, when in the browser, I also catch myself submitting forms with control-x control-s.

Americans reverted to the -ize spelling on the principle of spelling words as they sound (a foreign concept to the language, we must all agree), and much of educated Britain likewise used the -ize spelling on etymological grounds. (Thus Oxford spelling [en-GB-oed].) Esteemed English institutions such as the Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press still use the -ize spelling, as did The Times, until it came to be perceived as an Americanism in the 1980s.

International English, such as that used by the United Nations, follows Oxford spelling and so uses -ize.

http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/scale_gradient.html

http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.0/230/

Also, India preserves the vocabulary of the old English bureaucracy, now lost in Britain. [Citation Needed]

If you like you can add the “compatible” though, which would conveniently add to the length.

  NAME
       perl − Practical Extraction and Report Language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

But I guess the php docs themselves have caused people to think that the p stands for 'perform' - from the php docs 'preg_match - Perform a regular expression match.'. So yeah.

The preg functions are wrappers around the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library, though (PCRE) vs the older POSIX greg PHP functions, so I do think they mean Perl.

The use of abbreviations and underscores in PHP is maddeningly inconsistent.

Example:

  pdf_stringwidth
  strlen
  str_replace