Funny, but completely ignorant of the fact that Canadian English is distinct from Amrican English. We generally spell it 'colour' here, but draw the line at 'connexion', and have two spellings for 'seriali[sz]e', depending on the audience and style guide you follow. Joe Clark has a wonderful book about this, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours (http://en-ca.org/).
Yeah, the opening paragraph to this one lost me. I have a Canadian passport and I was living in Canada at the time and we spell it "colour" there. But yes, I chose to go with American English over Canadian/Danish/Inuktituk simply because I was already used to that from other languages. Like others have mentioned, non-American programmers don't tend to think of the terms in programming languages as an extension of the language, but simply as tokens that do things. Having those tokens consistent across languages makes sense.
Yeah, it makes me wonder if we'll ever see a programming language that uses "colour." Are there any out there? We must do something to reverse this trend!!!
Interestingly, Canadian English is almost en-GB-oed -- which is the closest thing the world has to "international standard English", seeing as it's the dialect preferred by both the United Nations and the International Organization for Standardization,