alt Hacker NewsI actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
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sreekanth67 • today at 2:52 AM
absolutely. this is an illusion our mind believes.
Absolutely! I’ll dive into this a bit more in the second section, where even technical acronyms can be considered harmful because they are learned at a surface level and then spread at meme-like speed.
For instance most people don’t know that even though both CAP and ACID contain consistency, they do not refer to the same idea. In CAP it’s about linearizability, while in ACID it’s about preserving invariants.