[mumblemumble]

Yup. I'm one of those folks who thinks that RAS syndrome is an entertaining and occasionally useful language quirk, and not at all a problem.

For example, even within a computing context, saying "Fish shell" just might help someone understand that you're talking about the Unix shell and not the cipher, and would always help someone who's not familiar with Fish to at least understand that you're talking about an alternative Unix shell.

By contrast, whenever someone posts a Hacker News article about ML, the first comment is invariably someone complaining that they thought it would be about machine learning, and this is unnecessarily confusing, and a borderline injustice, it should change its name, etc. It would probably be easier for everyone involved if it were idiomatic to say "ML language", even thought doing so would be redundant.

[CRConrad]

But ML preceded ML (at least as a somewhat widespread topic of discussion), so it's the machine learning fans who get to come up with alternative terminology.