Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms
Infra, algo, ..., are we all on first-name terms with basic concepts or just trying to sound "in crowd"? Examples of cringeworthy acronyms requested, the more egregious the better, ...
* "physically", e.g. "I physically deleted the files", when in fact the meaning is more like "actually", "manually", or "using one fewer layers of abstraction", since physical deletion would presumably involve a hammer or shredder or something along those lines.
* "special characters", e.g. "the application breaks when users input special characters in the username field". Often people use this term to refer to anything other than a-z0-9, including things as mundane as spaces or punctuation. To my mind, any character that exists in 7-bit ASCII or has a dedicated key on the keyboard just isn't that special!
Webster’s defines an acronym as “a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term”.
It’s a huge pet peeve, as someone between roles, when folks are imprecise in their terminology, especially if it’s a role that will involve writing code rather than say, being a penetration tester…
(Things like… that… require *lateral thinking*, not precision.)
i10n, i18n, but I've also seen k8s for Kubernetes
[shows self out]
(*) i.e. "say that one more time and I am not responsible for my reaction". Samuel L. Jackson put it a little differently though.
i-almost anything - usually mindless marketing.
The fad of naming products i-whatever has thankfully tailed off.