| Abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms[1] will always come at the expense of the reader. Saying the reader should know what they mean, is a lazy and short sighted assumption of who's reading and when (today? decades from now?) Then the question is: what's gained to justify burdening the reader with ambiguity? Space? In which modern context is space really a problem? Time? You're just costing the reader time in having think about the meaning and possibly having to look it up I can't honestly think of any other supposed benefit to collapsing something explicit into something ambiguous. More often than not, the writer is being lazy, short sighted, and in some cases, irresponsible. When see someone use a lot of these in their daily discourse, I worry about their naming discipline in their code as well. [1] Abbreviation: esp. for especially Initialism: HTTP for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Acronym: NASA (pronounced as a word) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration) |