I've always been amused/irritated that programming languages inflict American English on the rest of the world. Whether you're French, Chinese, or Greek or Malay, you have to program in English: if/then/else, while, open, ...

When I started to learn programming, one of the first things our professor told us that while the keywords "if", "then", "else", etc might look like English words, they weren't. They were just symbols, and the fact they just happened to look like English words was something we should consider a coincidence.

At that moment, almost 20 years ago, I thought it was a joke. But over time, I've seen it as a valuable lesson - to be able to abstract away the "English" meaning of the word, and just see the bunch of letters as a symbol.

Abigail