protip: learn metric abbreviations and save even 90%!!!11!

What is AI?
CS student: Artificial intelligence
Graphics Designer: Adobe Illustrator
Biology student: Anthro Insertion
Pervert: Anal Intercourse

Lesson: be careful with your abbreviations

"Can't have a fucking std (method) call, give me a break"

Said that loudly on a phone call. Wondering why people were give me dirty looks on the train

As a German developer living in Germany, I am used to write my code completely in English. In all of my former companies that was also the norm. In one company, we even talked completely in English with each other to a point where even if only German people where in a room, they would default to English at one point in a conversation because it became second nature to us.

(That company was very international and we had a lot of people from all over the world working there.)

Now, I work at a new German company that focuses on the German market. And for some reason I failed to ask them:

Do you write your code in English?

Because that's the norm, isn't it!? I just assumed it to be the case.

Nope! This time it is a mess of German and English term intermixing in glorious abysmal ways I never thought possible.

Sometimes we translate terms, sometimes we don't. So you have to wrap your mind around collections of words that COULD mean the same thing unless they don't. Best case, you have two words for the same thing, but I've seen up to five words (or abbreviations) to describe one business entity. Madness.

And don't get me started on the plurals. In English, it's almost exclusively: add an `s`.

In German, the singular and plural can be the same (e.g. all nouns ending with `-er`) so tough luck determining if you are on an object or an array of objects. (Weak typing language in use does not help either but that's an entirely different rant.)

Today I learned what GNU acronym stands for:

GNU = GNU's Not Unix!

😂 why doesn't Computer Science have more acronyms like that?

First lecture of computer networks. Let's shove all of these abbreviations with their meaning, and possibly a associated port number in one 1.5 hour lecture:

HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, TCP, IP, UDP, ISP, DSL, DNS, LAN, WLAN, WDM, P2P, TELNET, PGP, TLS, SSL, SSH, MIME, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, IANA, DHT, RTT, DHCP

I really feel sorry for students who didn't have previous knowledge about this stuff..

My company has sort of project team ("FachArbeitsGruppe" in German) meetings regularly and we love our abbreviations so every now and then at work I see an email or document just labeled "FAG". I think there's even a users group called "FAG IT".

God, I love when people name stuff right. Now I'm reading through an open source project, trying to find out how they solved a critical issue I'm facing now. It's not a small one but navigating through it is a breeze. Look through variable/function names and I don't even really need to read the code. Meanwhile, last assignment, there was "yangDataHandler" and "yangDataManager" that, obviously, had nothing to do with each other in either interoperability or functionality - and then half of the variables would get aliased to abbreviations. Uh, yes, sure it's obvious what
𝚋𝚣𝚋𝚠𝚒 variable means. Just let me run it through 𝚒𝚍𝚣𝚍() function.

Important Abbreviations In IT security.

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

am i the only one who see tech abbreviations on european car plates ? (ex : 3817 FTP)

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

It's embarassing and you guys will find it either rude or annoying but I have readied myself and here goes my confession;

Whenever I see the abbreviation for Command line interface I cringe. You know because cli ? And I read it in my head as 'Kli' which is like the shortened form of a female part ?
I can't just read it as "See, el, ai" or think 'Command line interface' directly.
My brain's first thought is it must be an acronym so you should read it like how you would read NASA which is also an acronym and not like 'cmd' which is not an acronym but just an abbreviation.
Thus whenever I see it I feel a mixture of embarassment, self-loathing and physical discomfort.

I wonder how can I not be embarassed and cringing whenever I see Something-CLI.
I just noticed when it's in uppercase I don't cringe as much. I should code a chrome extension to change all CLI abbreviations to upper case.

Considering most IDEs can autocomplete basic things like function names, would it be beneficial (for learning purposes at least) that a language avoids ENTIRELY any abbreviations?

For example, let's take some of C's printf family.

Instead of fprintf, printf and sprintf, the new function names would be something like print_formatted_to_filestream, print_formatted and print_formatted_to_string respectively.

Meetings.

Too many meetings.

"Why do you explain...." 10kv electrical shock.

Explanation so everyone has the same knowledge.

"But CD ES process of LCE..." Water. From the emergency hose. In the face.

For fucks sake, we are using speech in a meeting so stop using motherfucking abbreviations you shit hole.

"We had bugs". Taking an hot iron and shoving it somewhere nice.

Explain - what the fuck are you talking about? What bugs? Tickets? Documentation? Implications of the bugs? Hate. Much hate.

Um. I don't know. Maybe. But if.

Thumb wrenches.

Please, stop wasting time, if it's non important, a " No " doesn't hurt....

Let me show you. (4k Monitor, 10 px font, bright neon colors, IDE looks like LSD trip in bad).

Crucification.

If you present stuff, good - but for christs sake, shove your motherfucking shitty IDE setting in your own arse and turn on presentation mode with neutral colors - bright or dark mode, I don't care, but readable without danger of seizure.

I can't stream my monitor right now because of "bla" "blabla" (some private shit that has ZERO to do with work).

I'll need some oxy if this goes on.

We're reaching whole new levels of abbreviations...

C/C++ is so fucking unreadable. Who had the cancer idea to use abbreviations for EVERYTHING?? If a word is longer than 3 chars you can be sure those psychologically unstable devs will use a shortcut.
Pointer ==> ptr
test_and_set ==> fucking t_a_s
rollback ==> rb
I don't want to play a shitty word guessing game for every fucking function in your horribly documented api.

So.. I have an itil exam tomorrow and every time I start reading I get angry because all I can think of is that there was someone who thought it would be cool to create an abnormal amount of management services and also created his own cool hipster abbreviations to make things even more complicated.

That was all I have to say. Goodbye and have a lovely day!

In this project we're working on, there are so many abbreviations for so many things.

+ "Hey, can you help me test XXX through YYY API?"
- "Sure. But may i ask, what do XXX and YYY actually stand for?"
+ "Well, no one knows"

So people can work on something for months without really knowing the name of what they're working on. Good to know.

Trying to talk about development principles in a place with shitty code and suddenly realise half the group is laughing. When asked why they replied those abbreviations are so funny (DRY, YAGNI, KiSS). And one of them is supposedly a senior Dev. fml

I'm going to confess: I am the type of developer that creates the ExcruciatinglyLongAndSpecificClassNameObject with the UtterlyDetailedExplanationMethod. It's just a thing I keep doing, despite voiced frustrations from people I've worked with. It just feels right in the mindset of self-documenting code

And while I acknowledge this isn't a flawless process, I see no other way around without losing information. I've tried alternatives, but everything feels like trading one issue for another:

- Abbreviations work as long as they are well known (XML, HTML, ...). As soon as you add your own (even if they make sense in the business context) you can bet your ass someone is going to have no idea what you're talking about. Even remembering your own shit is difficult after X months.

- Removing redundant naming seems fine until it isn't redundant anymore (like when a feature with similar traits gets added). and you can bet your ass no-one is going to refactor the existing part to specify how it differs from the newly added stuff.

- Moving details to namespaces is IMO just moving the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. Also have had folks that just auto-include namespaces in VS without looking if they need the class from namespaceA or namespaceB and then proceed to complain why it doesn't compile.

So, since I am out of ideas, I'd like to ask you folks: Is it possible to reduce class/method name lengths without losing information? Or is self-documenting code just an ideal I'm trying too hard to achieve? Or are long names not a problem at all? I'm looking forward to your answers.

PDSCH, PDCCH, PBCH, PUSCH, PUCCH, PRACH, PCFICH
abbreviations, abbreviations everywhere

When a non-tech friend who does not know many English words and slangs wants to talk about Google Assistant and abbreviates it to GooAss.

Decided to go through my current project and change the naming conventions to actually obey the standard Microsoft C# naming convention standards.... Fuck me this is going to be fun -.-

(I use camel case and a lot of 'unnecessary' abbreviations :-P)

Hate when people talk about or trying to recruit somebody who knows well PPC and they *don't* mean PowerPC. I almost got convinced that the architecture is rising from the ashes and it's just stupid marketers reusing well known abbreviations.

Let's take a commonly used abbreviation, and replace the meaning with a more fitting one for developers!

Like,
DUI: Developing Under Influence

I'm not very creative, sorry, so I want to hear what you guys come up with!

All the abbreviations. People from Head quarters specifically, they start talking in lingo, in a global conference call, terms & language which is strictly internal to the group, and that too in abbreviated form. Some day i am going to get berserk on these folks. Fun starts when two different groups have same abbreviation for different things.

My misses said she was to young for me as I occasionally drop I'm a bit of Brb, brt wtf etc.. into my messages (I don't like lol), and thus she responds with this:

"U need someone who knows what the fuck those silly little letters mean! "

My messages are childish, eh dear?

You join a new company and you're faced with loads and loads of abbreviations that only you don't understand. As if I'm not confused enough with with the new codebase and process and everything.

"I'm going to save space in my source code file by using obscure abbreviations for all my #define statements, and cramming as much C code into as few lines as possible."
- teammate who apparently has no idea how a preprocessor works, and who thinks "code density" literally means cramming lines of code in as small a space as possible in the source file!