| Home -> March 1997 -> Acronym Rant |
Acronyms are the surest way to confuse your ideas and alienate people. Any acronym introduces a level of seperation between someone hearing it for the first time and the idea the acronym represents. Words can do that already, if not properly chosen. Why introduce further confusion.
I do not think this is trivial. As technology gives us more ideas with names like GUI, OOP, RDBMS, and VRML, these terms pile onto eachother into an indescernible alphabet soup of letters with no inherent meaning. Not that object-oriented programming necessarily conveys the exact idea, but at least one can tell that it involves programming. People understand what that means, if not how to do it in any given language. So object-oriented programming is probably a language, or a way of programming, involving objects.
That is the important part of the name. Objects. What is an object, and how is it different from other programming ideas. The acronym OOP does not benfit from the connotations of the word programming. It floats in that alphabet soup without anchor to any established terms or concepts. Instead, when someone sees OOP, they have to ask for a translation, and the answer is always "object-oriented programming". Most people don't have the guts to inquire once again, "what is object-oriented?"
How unfortunate. Because the concept of objects is what the person who used the term OOP wants to convey. Not the meaning of the letters "OOP".
This phenomenon is not limited to programmers and engineers, though it does seem that way at times. Business uses them incessantly as well. Even there, however, I think the acronyms are most often used for expressing abstract ideas. That, I argue, is when they are least effective.
Technical people like to say that the only reason they use so many acronyms is that they are tired of saying long phrases like "graphical user interface". Well, too fucking bad. If they are writing in a paper, use GUI, they can go back and replace with the nice "find/replace" functionality in their word processor. Or better yet, Mr. and Ms. Technical, with no time to spare on a mere 5 extra syllables, can use the :ab command in vi to abbreviate the term for them.
If speaking in public, use a term people can grasp, or be prepared to stare at a lot of nostrils as people lean back and doze off in their seats.
Better yet, just use the word graphical. Most often, I see GUI as an adjective, not a noun. As in GUI controls, or GUI programs. Graphical programs works fine, champ, and everyone knows what you mean.
Technical people had better listen, and get better at naming things. Or the marketing people will do it for them. And who the hell wants that to happen?
But Anagrams are lots of fun.
Last Updated: 5 March 1997
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