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Comment by grrdotcloud | Hacker News Reader

Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Articles and headlines with TLAs without initial definitions are AAF.

Would any reader who did not already know the name of the standard Haskell compiler have been any more enlightened if it had said "Glasgow Haskell Compiler" in the first paragraph? As it stands, the first paragraph of the article merely strongly implies it's an optimising compiler for Haskell, moderately strongly implies that it's the compiler for Haskell, and links to the GHC GitLab. I assert that the only reason one might want the words "Glasgow Haskell Compiler" here is if you wanted to search for it unambiguously, but "GHC haskell" is already entirely unambiguous. It's not like the name is descriptive; you're not going to do anything differently because it was born at the University of Glasgow.

I had to open the article to understand what it was about. The initialism is ambiguous; I thought someone might be trying to shorten GitHub Copilot and was curious to see how the team behind it was optimizing its speed. I would have been much more enlightened.

If you’re attempting to share something with an audience not steeped in your jargon, it’s usually better practice to lead with the full then shorten later.

One could use the less accurate title "Making haskell faster at emitting code" I guess!

However, don't we have to accept sometimes that the title does not tell the full story, it's just half a sentence after all, it's not even a summary, it's the heading?

This is HN. Headlines are full of jargon - it's an expectation for a diverse technical forum.

Haskell is not necessarily popular enough to consider its jargon common knowledge. As the headline doesn't mention Haskell, it's understandable that people might not have enough context to make a guess at this TLA.

You make assumptions that your future interlocutors would associate the contraction "Glasgow Haskell Compiler" with the "Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System" without any awkwardness on their behalf.

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