Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms

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• Hacker News
• tl;dr
  by alex1138
• I was disappointed that KAOS was not an acronym.
  by WalterBright
• IFHA
  by BrokenCogs
• All communication assumes prerequisite knowledge, if nothing more than that the listener or reader can hear or see and understands language at all. The top post on page one right now is "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter." I can't see that a single person complained, including me, that we're simply assumed to know what Fable, reMarkable, and Tom Riddle's diary are. Of those three, I only know Fable. Expanding an acronym or initialism will probably result in more people understanding the meaning but that seems far less true of software tech specifications than common public language. Non-techies probably aren't going to know what hypertext is or the difference between a markup language and any other language and may very well recognize http and html better than their expansions.
  by nonameiguess
• Since we're talking about fatigue: weary*
  by pixelpoet
• https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wary
  by dwb
• My company has a strict NTLA policy.

  That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms

  Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)

  by gumby
• How do you find out if Tick has been approved? Is that a recursion project?
  by BLKNSLVR
• That seems worse to me.
  by thayne
• Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed.

  But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.

  by burnto
• Big Hairy Audacious Goal was a new one to me.
  by Zecc
• It's very similar to people that feel compelled to constantly name drop people and companies they've heard off that supposedly did some cool stuff that impressed them. A lot of the tech scene is people just blabbing at each other about who and what they've heard about.
  by jillesvangurp
• I Have always found that acronyms are not the problem. They are necessary. However they become a problem when a lot of people start shoehorning them as attention targets instead of using them naturally in flow.
  by loaderchips
• I enjoyed this article about AFSI.
  by JoshGG
• I felt like it was just another WIWA rehash.
  by tclancy
• I think I've accumulated enough acronym cruft in my middling age where it has introduced serious imprecision in my language and understanding. Particularly when the recycling of acronyms is so common. PTP, P2P, PVP, NTP, LDAP, DNS, SMTP, B2B, CRM, SAP, SATA, IDE, PCI...at some point these terms stop meaning anything to me anymore and my eyes glaze rather than recollect context
  by jterrys
• some of my favorite forum communities heavily rely on acronyms. but they also have a maintained gossary that introduces all the community/industry-specific acronyms. Acronyms help boost the density of the information conveyed
  by fouc
• It's also cheap shibboleth for communities - if you talk like we talk then you're one of us
  by stirfish
• I think context and audience matter a lot. The post seems to mostly be talking about acronyms in the context of writing that's aimed at a public audience, but a lot of acronym use is aimed at a much more targeted audience.

  For example, I work on a product that pulls data about plant species from various data sources. I'm not about to type "Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species" or "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" everywhere; everyone on my team, and pretty much anyone working in this problem space, knows them as "GRIIS" and "GBIF." If I wrote the names out every time, it'd probably be less clear to my audience: they'd most likely have to reconstruct the familiar acronyms in their heads to follow what I was talking about.

  by koreth1
• > I think context and audience matter a lot.

  I believe people who use a lot of (unexpanded) abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms, are lazy in their thinking about context and audience anyway.

  The audience can be an assumption, especially in posterity. The context of where the message/document is read, isn't set in stone either.

  by jorisw
• The feeling of being an outsider because you don't know the acronym is just as real in non-public settings. The new guy on the team for example. There's a real feeling that you should already know it, even if it's the first time you've heard the other person say it. The first time you heard GBIF, did you know what it meant? How did you feel when you heard it?
  by forgotusername6
• One thing that irks me quite a bit is when adjacent fields adopt the same acronym for different things

  LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)

  by lmpdev
• Yeah, the TLA (three-letter acronym) space is vastly overcrowded and most TLAs are overloaded. This goes double for TLAs (two-letter acronyms). :P
  by taneq
• yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.

  Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...

  by niccl
• That's why it's important to only use acronyms in their context, or provide the context when using them. And for goodness sake, expand them on the first use if you're audience is not already familiar with them! (and really, even if they are, it's just polite)
  by stronglikedan
• Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms[1] will always come at the expense of the reader. Saying the reader should know what they mean, is a lazy and short sighted assumption of who's reading and when (today? decades from now?)

  Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity?

  Space? In which modern context is space really a problem?

  Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up

  I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible.

  When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well.

  [1]

  Abbreviation: esp. for especially

  Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

  Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

  by jorisw
• Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
  by zjp
• I don't have to guess because I'm smart enough to look things up.

  P.S. The response is a ridiculous non sequitur -- I didn't say anything either for or against such terms, just that their meaning can be discerned.

  But I would note that all of language requires all readers to be familiar with terms and their meanings. And specifically, if people aren't familiar with the notion of language-independent code then they aren't likely to understand what "internationalization" refers to, and if they are familiar with the topic then they almost certainly know what i18n means ... and the time and effort that it took to learn it is infinitesimal relative to all the other language and meanings that they have acquired.

  Further, the whole argument from this person is intellectually dishonest nonsense. They claim that terms like HTTP and NASA are "at the expense of the reader", which is simply false. I and most other readers would far prefer to see these acronyms and initialisms than to have them spelled out every time. (And it would be a disaster if http were spelled out in URLs -- and it would be a disservice to the reader to spell that out.)

  by jibal
• Yep, I've always thought they were f5g s4d.

  Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.

  If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com

  by BLKNSLVR
• Imagine if Germans had invented this style. Great compressibility, but good luck dealing with a65z.
  by sph