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I love this kind of humor.

Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? If someone would always talk like that I would seem very fake and off to me and make me very suspicious. The only times I expressed myself like that was in university application letters.

I wish someone would do a Scottish or Australian version of PHP complete with swear words. I'd pay good money for that (I have my Alexa set to Aussie, totally worth it).

> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time?

The other side of the same humor is re-writing everything with "oi, c*nt, over here, you c****sucker"

Aaaand I think it's the same people :)

Some examples he used are never said. I would say something like "perchance" very rarely, and "Good morrow" never. "Would you mind", well I suppose we say this all the time.
However using "perchance" as "if" replacement is somewhat ingenious. Always be polite in your sourcecode. :D
No. We really don't.

People who speak Received Pronunciation (RP) may speak more in this way (look up Jacob Rees-Mogg if you really want to see how stupid it sounds) but they are a small minority of the British people.

we definitely don't speak politely about Jacob Rees-Mogg
Hm? He's certainly the smartest and most skilled MP by far. A Victorian gentleman who invented a time-machine to travel 150 years in the future? Name one other MP who can match his genius.
I’m curious why you think RP sounds stupid.
He's confusing RP with how JRM speaks. JRM has entire layers of silly cosplay on top of RP.

Personally my go-to for RP would be Trevor McDonald.

I was more saying that one particular example (JRM) sounds stupid. I don't think this is a contentious issue.

However, RP can sound a bit silly with some pronunciations. The same is true with any accent.

P.S. I'm from Yorkshire so I'm used to accents being mocked.
How JRM speaks doesn’t bother me at all.

Must be an age thing.

What bothers me is the emergence over the last 10 or 15 years is the new London accent that was previously Thames Estaury in the 90s and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had.

The new accent is typified by -ah or -ar instead of -er.

The police recruitment adverts being the best example. Become a police office-aah instead of police office-er.

> and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had.

It wasn't really, though - it was just the first one you heard. Accents are always in flux.

(An interesting comparison for me is the Sex Pistols' car crash Bill Grundy interview against a modern London yoof accent. Major, major change just within my lifetime).

By bona fide London accent I mean that the way both sets of my grandparents spoke was different to each other in London and different again to their cousins that lived in Kent and Surrey. The Thames Estuary accent pretty much replaced the London accent and those of each of the Home Counties.
Sure, I get it. I'm not trying to be nitpicky (I swear!) I'm just trying to point out that the Elizabethan London accent, the Victorian London accent, and today's London accent are no less bona fide.
Interestingly JRM doesn't have any blue blood at all despite the whole 'honourable member for the early 19th century' persona, public image is a fascinating thing!
Isn't RP basically BBC-speak and thus a lot more widespread? Even if it's not the native accent of a lot of people.
Nah, it's a caricature of a particular class of Brit, mostly from a particular period. We do have different turns of phrase, some of which are very local even within Britain, but they're not all posh and polite, if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence
> if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence

I'd say the self-deprecating humour is also a mainstay of the Brits, encompassing almost all social classes. Granted, I'm not a Brit, but a former boss of mine (I'd also call him a friend) was a Brit and he checked all the stereotypes related to that. Really great guy.

They (the Brits) used to also be renowned for their black humour, at least around these parts of the European continent, but I feel that that is beginning to fade out (maybe it has become too culturally sensitive to joke about death? I wouldn't know)

> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time?

No, no-one talks like that, and also "British people" don't really talk the same way even from one town to the next. There's not really any such thing as a "British accent".

You know how different a New Englander talks from a Texan? That's how different someone from Glasgow sounds compared to someone from Edinburgh, or someone from Manchester compared to someone from Birmingham.

I would say the difference between West Country, Home Counties, North East and Glasgow is significantly higher than the difference between most US States. Although that's presumably because we have had thousands of years to develop dialects and the US didn't have very long until TV, radio, telephone started mashing dialects from regions together.

I can tell the difference between New England and Florida but it isn't quite in the same league.

Accents in the UK aren't even consistent in the same place. My wife and I have different accents and grew up in the same medium large sized town.
Accents in the UK also have a strong class dimension. Middle class people often speak in a very different way to working class people from the same area.
The general pattern observed in linguistics is that accents/dialects/languages and language families have the greatest level of diversity in the area where they originated.

E.g. Austronesian is a huge language family that covers an enormous geographic area including Hawaii, the Philippines, Indonesia and even as far as Madagascar, and it contains over 1,000 distinct languages divided into 9 subfamilies - and yet all but one of those subfamilies are found exclusively in Taiwan, where proto-Austronesian first emerged roughly 5000 years ago.

Dunno if there is such a thing as "how British people talk".

Something that's struck me about the country is how much the way you talk reflects where you are from and your station in life. Like not just which region, there's frequently dialects/sociolects for different parts of a city.

Brits will say that they don't but if you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything. There are a lot of other native speakers in the UK, for example from Australia or the USA, and you can instantly tell if this person is from the UK or Australia and it's not only the accent that gives away.

Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.

f you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything

Brits will kill me for this, but it's more of an European thing - the Brits just preserved it a bit more aggressively than others, because they never actually abolished the aristocratic system that generated it.

>it's more of an European thing

Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. You'll get much less unintentional smiles or politeness than in the UK.

> Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see.

Oh oh, "yes true", and your note confirms it... What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. So they are at the opposite end of that particular scale.

> What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy.

Well, I wasn't a big fan of it, but the reality of the matter is... for most of us, someone else destroyed our aristocracy (and all of our intelligentsia with it) for us.

Tbh a lot of the aristocratic address stuff that's still present in other languages is long gone from British English, except for people employed as butlers and people sarcastically mimicking the forms of address used by butlers. Even Americans are more likely to address people as "Sir" than Britons under pensionable age, and English hasn't had the polite second person pronoun most languages do for a long time, never mind involving a dilemma over whether to use a construction that would literally translate as "would your grace..." in everyday interactions to avoid people getting upset by the overfamiliarity of "you"!

We do love deliberate understatement, evasion and saying please a lot though!

British English has a very flat hierarchy, with no T/V distinction as found in French or Russian, and very little use of honorifics or titles (even for authority figures like university professors).

British politeness is not based on hierarchy, but based on (sometimes excessive) apologising for inconvenience.

No, it's a joke.

Source: I wrote it :)

> Do british people really talk that polite IRL all the time?

It's that or cockney. Those are literally your only options if you want anyone from the UK to understand you.

Do we heck. There are many different dialect and accents in the UK, but nobody talks like that (Apart from the 18th Century cosplayer, Jacob Rees Mogg, but thankfully we hear less from him nowadays)
Britain is a patchwork of different dialects and speech patterns with numerous class-based and regional variations. We don't all speak the same any more than Americans do.
"G'day Alexa." And I imagine she calls you a cunt once in a while, for good measure.
Well, sometimes you get a bit of the classic "you wot mate? Keep your gob shut or we'll have a barney, innit." Depends on circumstances, really.
(comment deleted)
> Text speak" is unheard of on the streets of London, as the natural ingrained British grammarian simply refuses to stoop to sending messages of the "c u soon traffic kthxbye" variety

Come on now, the streets of London are full of nonsense like this: For example, the word "Aris" is often used to indicate the buttocks. This is the result of a double rhyme, starting with the original rough synonym "arse", which is rhymed with "bottle and glass", leading to "bottle". "Bottle" was then rhymed with "Aristotle" and truncated to "Aris"

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

I fear you may have fallen into a trap of reading those words without the humour they were intended to convey.
I get the joke and made my own
(comment deleted)
We may have different definitions of the word "joke" :P
Only the unwashed or criminal element will ever use rhyming slang - the whole point of its existence is obfuscation from police eavesdropping. I'll have you know, dear sir, that no respected member of the middle or upper classes should ever be found employing such bastardised lingo. The glorious Empire has no use for such trickery.
> Only the unwashed or criminal element

We're talking about PHP here, so yes.

Sir, I am confounded that you would seek to equate the noble vernacular present betwixt the fine men of industry in Our Great City, with that of the filthy street patois which serves only to tarnish the fine polish of gentlemanly character.
A rhyming slang version of PHP would balance things out. A new project for someone.
I am definitely implementing would_you_mind/actually_i_do_mind structures.
Most of this could be implemented with the C preprocessor. Splendid.
Also setcookie() and $_COOKIE need to be renamed to setbiscuit() and £_BISCUIT.
Just in case Americans are confused as to how us Brits distinguish

Definitely biscuits: https://www.abelandcole.co.uk/chocolate-chip-digestives-mr-o...

Obviously cookies: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/258025719

I hope things are clear now.

Now if someone could explain to me how a shit savoruy scone is a "biscuit" on your side of the pond... I'd appreciate it

Are those American biscuits like scones? I thought they were akin to dumplings. We really are "two countries separated by a common language".

(To be clear, these dumplings:

https://www.errenskitchen.com/suet-dumplings/

Not these dumplings:

https://omnivorescookbook.com/recipes/how-to-make-chinese-du... )

I believe they're essentially scones (though no sugar which I suppose is optional in a scone) but eaten like dumplings.

Dumplings are of course far superior. (And clotted cream & jam is a better way to eat a scone.)

Or the madness that is jam & then clotted cream…
That really does just objectively make less sense, I don't understand that debate - you don't try and apply butter to your sandwich after layering cheese and tomato or whatever, you spread the more solid thing first.
Yep. I don’t get it, and I’m sure the Cornish apologists will be here shortly to explain why it makes sense.
This is exactly why we should all support Cornish devolution.
Perhaps there is a culinary 3D printer than can print in 3D, jam and clotted cream.
Cornwall has to cling to it, because otherwise all they have is cornish pasties and incest
I live in Devon, so I'm compelled to agree. Cream goes first, no matter what the Cornish have to say on the matter. Although, apparently the late Queen preferred the Cornish method.
And why exactly should we listen to a German when it comes to these things?
I'm sure you only mean to be anti-royalist^, but the implication for the rest of the citizens by birth of this fairly multicultural country is extremely intolerant if not racist.

^Understanding that just makes it a baseless & lazy argument, a joke at best.

Jam spreads thinly and is less viscous, so is much more suited to a thinly spread layer across the surface.

Clotted cream is far thicker and lends itself to a big dollop on top which keeps its shape and does not run off the sides.

Why do people still question this obviously infallible logic?

Sir, if you're spreading your jam thinly then you are doing scones wrong.
How to pronounce scone is another divisive topic in itself.

Does it rhyme with gone or cone?

Linguists at Cambridge University have published a map of the regional variations:

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-app-maps-decli...

I've always pronounced scone as scone myself but my wife insists on saying scone as scone. Madness.
“Home to Scone” to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony.
I've never in my life heard someone say "Backend" instead of "Autumn"
There's a third common sound where it rhymes with "on": 1. /skɒn/ 2. /skoʊn/ 3. /skɑːn/

But I guess that also depends on how you pronounce gone, as to whether it rhymes with 1 or 3…

I make biscuits and scones regularly and yes, it's the same recipe minus sugar, which is similar to the suet dumplings recipe here EXCEPT you would not boil/poach a biscuit - that would make it a dumpling. I'd say it's more the method of cooking that defines a dumpling than the dough recipe - you could use biscuit dough but it doesn't have to be and often isn't.
Languages are fun. In Turkish,

Bisküvi (Biscuit): https://www.akakce.com/biskuvi/en-ucuz-ulker-potibor-800-gr-...

In German,

Kekse: https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/4360170...

Again in Turkish,

Kek: https://www.akakce.com/kek/en-ucuz-balocco-panettone-500-gr-...

But if it's a wet cake, then, "Pasta": https://www.carrefoursa.com/pastalar/c/1289

What you consider to be pasta is "makarna": https://www.carrefoursa.com/pastalar/c/1289

So, makarna/Macaroni is normally considered to be a sort of pasta, but in French there is,

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

I love this madness :)

There's not just macarons but also macaroons which are a completely different type of cookie/biscuit.
In UK we have French macarons, but also macaroons ... which are one of two distinct types of biscuit, both with the same name -- one made of almond and one made of coconut, although the latter is more like a flat cake.
Those both in USA too, same spelling.
And in France they also have Macron to make matters even more complicated :)
Fun fact(1): The German word Kekse is a Germanization of the term "cakes". Although a biscuit isn't exactly a cake :)

(1) - At least I think it's funny :)

The term “cookie” literally means “little cake” from the Dutch “koekje”. The term “biscuit” comes from the French for “twice cooked (cake)”.
> ... a biscuit isn't exactly a cake...

Certainly not. By law. Biscuits are luxury goods, and as such are taxed appropriately, whereas cakes are essential food items, and have a lower tax rate. This culminated in a VAT tribunal in 1991 [0] where the makers of Jaffa Cakes argued that said items were cakes not biscuits, in order to get the lower tax rate. One of the winning arguments was that cakes go stale, while biscuits go soft. I think this could count as precedent for a proper legal definition of the difference between cakes and biscuits. (Of course, American-style cookies aren't biscuits either by this definition.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status

this is an underrated comment that explains the difference between cookie and biscuit in an unambiguous way
Biscuit - "twice baked" in French.
That would then be „Zwieback“ in German, which refers to a kind of crispy mildly sweet bread that children get fed when they are ill :)
Or Doppelback, a break type
This is one of those facepalm moments :-))
German also has Biskuit, but it's used for a kind of dough used to make cake sponges.
We (French speakers) call macaroni macaroni though. Although there is also the term "coudes", meaning "elbows".
Aha! Well, I got fooled by Wikipedia, which links to the French page "macaron" from the English Macaron page as its translation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaron

After I did follow the link, I saw my mistake :)

I think it is pretty clear - cookies are a doughier cake-like (but not risen) mixture containing egg, biscuits are just flour/sugar/butter.
> Now if someone could explain to me how a shit savoruy scone is a "biscuit" on your side of the pond

It may be because "scones and gravy" sounds like it would taste, well...British.

Don't get anybody started on the tax status of Jaffa cakes
The system lords are gonna get really pissed if someone starts making cakes out of their jaffa.
Random observation: Tesco’s website reminds me so much of Costco brand and feel that I had to check if one owned the other.
For me, the best description I've been given comes down to the way that they are baked:

Cookies - Starts from a ball or blob, which spreads into a flattened shape during baking.

Biscuits - Starts from a shape cut from a flat rolled sheet, that mostly retains its shape during cooking.

Which would make biscuits "Plätzchen" in German.
I guess you're being sarcastic?

Based on the pictures, those look more or less the same to me...

No, they're very different, but I agree that the pictures look alike.
Very different, to the degree that if you were offered one and given the other you'd be confuse (but of course, you wouldn't vocalise it).
Sarcasm, if this is sarcasm, doesn't scale well across cultures, and especially not online, in addition, in text form :-)

That's if you're being sarcastic in addition to OP's original comment.

This is not sarcasm. I have a distinct idea in my head of what a cookie should generally look like, and it doesn't look like a biscuit. I can see the confusion, both have chocolate chips in and your classic digestive usually doesn't, but I'd put good money on my ability to identify one or the other
It's definitely sarcasm :) Most Brits would likely identify the first link as "cookies" too (based on their appearance at least)
The imperative mood of “set” feels impolite though.

Maybe something like wont_you_have_a_biscuit_please()?

Makes sense in the GDPR context.
Post-Brexit, GDPR is a dirty word in Britain though. It's part of the dreaded pan-European regulation that must be purged post haste.

So maybe it's:

  wont_you_please_have_this_delicious_guano_biscuit_imported_thanks_to_our_splendid_bilateral_trade_deal_with_vanuatu()
Does PHP have a limit on the length of a function name?
> Post-Brexit, GDPR is a dirty word in Britain though.

Okay, UK GDPR. My sincere apologies.

Yeah, offer_biscuit() seems appropriate.
Honestly, I've seen this thing multiple times over the last ten years and it's stupid.

EDIT: Yeah, go ahead and down vote me. I'm British and I find it stupid. It's a weird caricature and unfunny.

if it makes you feel any better, I agree it's pretty overplayed and lazy of a joke.
Clearly what's needed is a Malcolm Tucker version of this.
do_this{

  // try
} you_fucking_what (Disappointment £d){

  fuckety_bye()

}
"Sorry" as a default prefix
As with the "please" keyword in Intercal, the compiler would have to enforce its use but not over-use.
I think "sorry" should be a suffix and "excuse me" the prefix
The ideology behind the extremely contemporary belief amongst brits that "s" is a British spelling is quite strange to me.

z is the British spelling and always has been, s is French and was lifted from French. And made wide-spread by British newspapers in the 60s+.

What is interesting in this case is this author goes all the way back to "connexion" without realising that contemporary to that spelling would be "specialize"

It’s not as clear cut as you make out. There are some specific verbs that should always take the ‘s’ in British English – for example, analyse (in American English, analyze). And then there are verbs that even in American English should always take the ‘s’, like revise and exercise.
I guess its mostly just amusing that cosmopolitans who are keen to appear "at home with everyone" display the same cultural parochialism as everyone else -- namely even doubling down on historical French spelling (over historical English) simply to avoid association with the US.

Similarly, of course, the scottish adopt historical englishisms; and so on, and so on.

With `z` however it's a project of those who'd claim to be above such.

There seems to be a perception in some that in cases where s and z are both officially valid (most of the time), that z is a vulgar Americanism (nasty pointy letter with a harsh sound, both of which stand out compared to the more refined smooth shape & sound of our lovely s!), when, as you point out, z is historically more correct in “proper” English. I don't think it is that they see s as english-english as such, but that they see z as american-english so go with s as an act of identity preservation.

I prefer -ise over -ize, I'm not sure why, maybe it fits better with how I pronounce/emphasise things when speaking. Though it isn't the case that either is more right in modern English: while -ize predates -ise, for about half a millennium it has been the case that both are valid so it is just down to preference.

Which ever you pick, just be consistent. There are some cases where one is considered valid and which one varies by variant of English, such as analyse/analyze, which is probably part of where the s-is-English comes from – applying a specific exception widely as if it were a rule.

There are a few things that many are convinced of about English which turn out to be quite false: the singular “they” being another one that has caused much discussion in recent years, or the not-splitting-infinitives thing which some are still determined to boldly hold on to.

Star Trek is solely and wholly responsible for the death of the unsplit infinitive.

TO BOLDLY GO? No, motherfuckers, you go boldly.

That's what you get when you take literary freedom and democratize it.
I will continue to defiantly split infinitives any time I like.
I've always understood the "rule" to be Greek-origin words take 'ize' and Latin-origin words take 'ise'. Personally I would rather have one or the other consistently.

I use 'ise' in all cases by default, but if I know my audience is American I use 'ize'. I'm not precious about it.

The z spelling is influenced by Greek, I believe. I think it's fair to say -ise is characteristically British, since it's widely used here and not in the U.S.
This is like trying to figure out what is more authentic pronunciation: /keltik/ or /seltik/ for C/Keltic.
According to Wikipedia[0], using "ise" is still the British spelling, as well as Australian spelling. However, the Oxford spelling of these words are using "ize".

After a customary search, I can't seem to find any sources that suggest using "ise" might be French, and made popular by British newspapers, besides the below Wikipedia article claiming newspapers using the "ise" spelling, instead of "ize". I'd love to see some sources on this if you have any.

I grew up in Britain, and have been spelling using the "ise" version, but since I've started working for a US company, I've started using "ize" everywhere since it's just easier. In addition, it's still accurate British, when using the Oxford spelling. Although, it did take me a while to get accustomed to changing my writing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

The '$' being used in variable names I think originates from the word 'string', from when it was necessary to differentiate types of variable in the code. It never related to currency.
A bit like people who get annoyed by the word soccer, an English word originally to distinguish Association Football (soccer) from Rugby Football (rugger) and other codes.
Worth noting that this word also has class connotations, in that only toffs at Oxford called it soccer. Working class people never did.
I really think you shouldn't take the article, its conclusions and recommendations too serious.
You mean ... seriously?
I always assumed it originated with Perl, where $ is for scalars and @ for arrays.
I'm sure this use of $ character is much older than Perl.

One counter-example I know first hand: Sinclair ROM BASIC uses $ for denoting strings, in both variable and function names.

The one I have in a Spectrum is copyrighted 1982, around 5 years before first Perl was released.

I'm sure there are older examples like this.

You're right, seems like this usage goes back to at least 1964 in BASIC.
You know what? Compared to the bland and non-self-evident “protected”, “hereditary” is a remarkably apt name. I’m not sure the concept itself is that useful, but if you have to have it, why not.
As someone who has not done enough object oriented programing not to confuse "private" and "protected" on every occasion I would welcome this to all languages.
I actually tanked one of my first job interviews because I totally blanked out and forgot what the difference between private and protected was.

I just never used it in practice. And I still don't.

That actually comes in useful as soon as you write library code, but seldomly in application code (at least mine): You'd use protected for internal methods intended to be used, and probably overwritten, by children classes. This allows defining internal extension points to customise the behaviour of a class.

Take a response caching middleware, for example, that uses a CacheStrategy class to control the behaviour of the cache. There's an interface, so we can depend on it in the middleware:

  interface CacheStrategyInterface {
    public function shouldCache(Request $request, Response $response): bool;
  }
and there's a default implementation, shipping with the library, which works for 90% of use cases:

  class DefaultStrategy implements CacheStrategyInterface {
    public function shouldCache(Request $request, Response $response): bool {
      if ( ! $this->isMethodCachable($request)) {
        return false;
      }

      return $this->isSuccessful($response);
    }

    // This method can be modified by user code: Maybe they implemented 
    // an API with a `"success": false` in the response body, despite 
    // the status code? There's no way to know that, let alone provide a
    // configuration switch for every possible failure condition in user
    // code implementing our middleware.
    protected function isSuccessful(Response $response): bool {
      return $response->isSuccessful() || $response->isRedirection();
    }

    // This method shall not be modified: Whether an HTTP request may be
    // cached is defined by specification, not implementation.
    private function isMethodCachable(Request $request): bool {
      return $request->isMethodCacheable();
    }
  }
Users may extend this implementation, and override the `isSuccessful` method with their own implementation used to check whether a response handled by the app was actually successful (and thus should be added to the cache).

This method isn't significant from the outside of the class - it would add needless weight to the API contract of our library. But still, there's value in allowing users building their own caching strategy to override it with their own checks. Such an implementation might look like this:

  class CustomStrategy extends DefaultStrategy {
    protected function isSuccessful(Response $response): bool {
      return $response->body('success', false) === true;
    }
  }
There's no boilerplate here, no need to reimplement the whole shouldCache method, when only a single, granular, override is enough. And that is why protected can be helpful :)

(This was taken from a Laravel library I maintain. If you want to check the full example, see here: https://github.com/matchory/response-cache/blob/master/src/S...)

I tanked one by forgetting the syntax for a for-loop once. I hardly ever used it at the time since I mostly dealt with infinite iterators.
indeed, now protected sounds a bit dodgy, innit? always felt lost in translation with them oop lads
A long time ago I spent a large part of a year writing some woftware in Rexx [1] on an IBM 3090 mainframe. Rexx was designed by Mike Cowlishaw, who (like me) is British, and (from memory) the language included a few "Britishisms". For example it's keyword for selecting output text colour allowed "colour" as well as "color". It also used "say" to print text. Twenty year-old me was a little bemused.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx

Postgres allows "EXPLAIN ANALYSE" as well as "EXPLAIN ANALYZE".
If $AnyProgrammingLanguage was German, unary “not” operator would be postfix.

   if (something == null nicht) { … }
I think it would be more beautiful that that:

    If (something nicht null ==) { }
I.e. falls (etwas nicht null ist) { },
Why?

It's obviously the == that should be postfix.

  "Falls    etwas     nicht null ist"
    if    something    not  null ==

  Falls etwas     nicht gleich   null ist.
  if    something not   ==       null

  Falls etwas     nicht ungleich null ist.
  if    something not   !=       null
We all know that das Nichts nichtet (nothingness nothings; Heidegger), so it should be

    falls etwas nichtet
To reflect the spirit of negating the meaning in simple sentences, not to follow exact grammatical order (but that’s also cool idea)
in Turkish too

if not something if something degilse

There was a formal proposal to adopt a German syntax for Scala:

https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala....

> Some users may have angst about typing characters such as ü and ß, but Odersky dismisses this idea: “Being completely unable to enter half the syntax on an English keyboard may make coding slower, but that never seemed to hold Scalaz back.”

Bravo Martin

That’s an April Fools joke, not a formal proposal
The "formal proposal" part was my December Fools joke.
Ah. My sarcasm detector was broken this morning!
``` const foo = await getFooAsync(); ```

vs

``` Konst foo = auf bekommenFooAsynchron() warten; ```

Perl caught me off guard with this. We apparently had a programmer who liked to write

Statement unless x;

This did not make left to write code scanning me happy.

I have fractionally more sympathy for the post-conditional `if` - `statement if x;` - because at least then you're not trying to invert things at the end of a sentence.

Only fractionally because I hate all post-conditionals with a passion. They're the garden paths[1] of coding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Hum... The only thing that changes is that the exception comes on its negated form. It doesn't make code scanning any harder, or interpreting it any more convoluted.

Personally, I do hate both of those (including the Python's ternary operator). But there is something with the bashism it shares, of `do_it() or die "trying"` that looks quite nice.

Ruby has this. Can be surprising to read code ... "Wait.. What? Oh ok."
I like to do that in Ruby. It just reads so natural:

  $x = foo() unless $y > 10
As with any language feature, you can over-use it, but in general once I was used to it I missed it in every other programming language.
I propose keep calm {} carry on {} for exception handling
I learned some BCPL before I ever touched C, simply because the system I was working on came with a BCPL compiler and not a C one (it was CP/M). BCPL always seemed to have a certain Englishness to it which I only noticed when I came later to other languages of US origin.
Always amusing that when we try be overtly fancy, or Americans try to sound more English, we tend to latch onto things the language purloined from the French, such as nouveau. And purloin.
Please, using French borrow words to sound more cultured is so passe.
Careful there, you might be committing a faux pas.

I prefer to use ad hoc and sui generis Latin phrases to make myself seem more intelligent than I really am.

I love when French words are borrowed and repronounced so you end up with Grand Prix being "Grand Pricks" instead of "Gran pree".
You would so, so totally love how the residents of Versailles, Indiana, US, pronounce their town's name. I'm very 'Merican and it makes me want to bang my head into to a wall.
A number of city names become shibboleths themselves - things like Spokane being pronounced "spow cane" instead of being spoken as spokan.

Of course if you go back far enough, even the original place names of many places are simply "bastardized" versions of the original. It's how Latin becomes Italian over time.

I assume this is some kind of satire; but satire usually has some kind of point to make, and I don't get the point of this article.
Us regular human beings call this 'fun' if that's any help to you?
OK, well that's how I read it: a jokey article (i.e. fun) that looks like satire (something that bites), but without any actual satirical bite or point. But perhaps I'm wasn't sharp enough to get the satirical point. And I didn't see it explained in the comments.

If it's just ragging on PHP's deficiencies, (a) that's old-hat, and (b) most of what the author teases about isn't actually a problem with the language.

It's just the author's dry, tongue-in-cheek British humour. He's not really attacking anything – just a bit of fun using English instead of American English.
The author is British? OK, well I'm surprised. Nobody in Britain uses the kinds of phrases he makes fun of. I enjoy dry, tongue-in-cheek humour; it's my stock-in-trade (except when I might be talking to foreigners, like here on HN; it can easily misfire).

I read the author as being a non-British English speaker.

> The author is British?

What ho, old bean. Yes, I am.

Haha! Well, evidently I read it wrong!

> What ho, old bean.

That's Jeeves and Wooster. And that was itself a parody.

I use some archaic phrases; I refer to "chaps", some disgraceful act being "a bit off", my hat is my "titfer" (cockney rhyming slang hasn't been restricted to cockneys since the 50s). But I don't pretend to be an Edwardian bourgeois twit, like the ridiculous Rees-Mogg.

I'm sorry I didn't get your humour; it's a drag to have to explain a joke.

If PHP has “continue”, it should be “thank_you_sir_may_i_have_another”.
When I read this, I could hear Rule Britannia playing at the back of my head.

I will be right back, going to prepare some tea and biscuits... Cheerio!