[greggman]

I guess we also need ones for other languages

    透明度: 0.5;
    色: 紫;

which does bring up the point, are we being at all culturally insensitive by making nearly all web standards English?

Or how about UsingCamelCase? Give than some languages don't have the concept of UPPER/lower case.

Does Go require you to use "er" for interfaces as in Writer, Reader, Serializer? That seems even worse given that it not just roman letters only it's English only. I don't know other languages but I suspect the suffix 'er' has no meaning in Spanish, Italian, French, and that being forced to added it to classes written using those languages would really suck.

    type Escribirer interface  // !?!?

[TazeTSchnitzel]

The thing about English use is, well, at least it is consistent. Everything uses American English, so if you need to learn to program, there is only one language to learn. Allowing other languages wouldn't solve much since English would still be present in all the API methods and so on, so I think consistency is better.

[eddieroger]

> Everything uses American English...

Isn't that kind of disingenuous? Everything may use the American English character set and dialect, but they're called programming languages for a reason. I don't consider my work to be in English, I consider it Objective-C or Java. In this way, they have their own subdialects anyway.

[chad_oliver]

"Everything uses American English"? Yeah, no. There's plenty of technical stuff on the web that uses British English.

[josephg]

There's very little code on the internet that uses British English. I'm Australian, and even when I write software that will only be used by other Australians, I still use American English so I don't have to think about it.

Spelling in documentation is much less important.

[oakesm9]

Do you have any examples to share? All the languages I've used have been american english, which is a sensible decision.

[Tripfag]

Schools here [Belgium] teach their pupils British English. Rightfully so, I'd say.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Sure. European schools teach European English. I'm not complaining about that, I speak British English.

[srl]

Go does not require "er", and in fact most code I've seen outside the standard library doesn't seem to follow any particular convention for using it. If there /was/ such a convention, it would obviously make sense to use the closest equivalent suffix in the language.