Acronym Anarchy
It has gotten out of control. The insanity has to be stopped. Words are not the enemy of programmers. Lower case is not bad. Programming languages such as C and C# respect lowercase letters! Multiple syllables can be used! In a need for brevity, it seems that the concept of easily identifiable terms and concepts has been lost!
Bradley Jones writes a nice article about the overwhelming acronym world and gives you an insight on to the real meaning of each one.
[Resource-Type: Article; Category: General; XRating: 3]
3 Comments:
SO? It is very common for people in the same profession to speak a language that is not easily understood outside the group. Acronyms are not evil by themselves, the sheer amount is.
I read Bradleys list and by his definition I'm not a developer. He's right insofar that I'm not using a Microsoft environment. A corresponding list of Java related acronyms would suit my taste. The Java world is full of acronyms and mysterious versioning. Was Servlet API 2.3 part of J2EE 1.3? Is JAXB part of JAXP or the otherway arounnd?
7:39 PM
You are correct that acronyms are not the enemy--it is more their over use. Worse is when a single acronym is used in mulitple ways -- even by the same company.
Based on the responses to my short article, I actually plan a follow up list or two of acronyms. Java is the next category of focus. I also believe that I could list 100 acronymns within the XML space. I was also looking to do a list of acronyms with multiple meanings; however, that list will be a bit harder to do.
Brad!
4:12 PM
Does the use of acronyms widen or close the communication gap between IT staff and 'normal' people? Most of the IT related stuff that is available is full of acronyms. Some acronyms are widely known and understood, others are incomprensible. It gets even better in phrases like 'X.509 certificate needed for HTTP over SSL'.
What I find much worse than acronyms is the hype wave that hits us from time to time. Since a number of years we seem to be unable to talk about interfaces without mentioning at least 3 times 'XML'.
Furthermore we seem to have run out of 3 letter acronyms. 4 and 5 letter acronyms are emerging now. They're bigger, so they must be better, right?
7:43 AM
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