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by astrange 1273 days ago
Most acronyms are more meaningful as acronyms than expanded.

Like this one for instance - have you actually learned anything now that you know it’s “dynamic frequency selection”? That’s not a good description of “an extra channel that sometimes isn’t available because radar uses it”.

4 comments

It conveys a lot more information than DFS.
It's way better when you learn the words. Now I understand it's about frequencies and channels.

DFS to a software crowd will always expand to depth-first search. I was trying to figure out if that's what was being discussed here (with plenty of skepticism, admittedly) until reading GP.

It helps in this article title some, but I usually see it written as “DFS channel”. In which case you already know it’s a kind of channel, so maybe it’s best to think of it as “sometimes-available channel”.
> It's way better when you learn the words.

Not always. I don't think learning what REST stands for helped anyone understand web service APIs

Yeah I'm specifically responding to the question above.

Some things like REST/HTML/XML are familiar enough that the initialism is as good as a dictionary word.

SOAP, on the other hand, I forget what that was. Hopefully it's not important.

It’s not about being familiar. It’s that “Representational State Transfer” is as meaningless as REST to someone who doesn’t know what REST is. (And honestly, even to those who do know what it means)
Most acronyms are more meaningful when you don't have dozens of them conflicting on the same 3 letter string on the same area of knowledge.
Another description: "dynamically picking channels to avoid radar activity". Seems more fitting with this one.