[hmottestad]

Nope. It's probably not the smartest thing to call your tech. Those who know what it is will know, everyone else will think MRI (magnetic).

I think a good guideline for choosing an acronym is how many hits it already has on google. MRI: 73,800,000

[colbyh]

Yeah, and while we're at it god forbid someone name a language after a colloquialism for a popular brewed and caffeinated drink. Or the island the beans for said drink sometimes come from. Or a snake that sometimes lives on that island...

If I told my parents I worked in Ruby all day they'd think I started a career in precious gem mining, who cares? "Those who know what it is will know..." are exactly 100% of the people that care about Matz's Ruby Interpreter and therefore this article.

[hmottestad]

Ruby isn't an acronym. Neither is Java. JVM is though, and the entire first page on google for JVM is about the java virtual machine. Had they called it MRI for java viRtual MachIne, it would still not be all over the front page.

[splitrocket]

There are 17,576 possible 3 letter acronyms. I would argue that its awefully hard to find one that isn't overloaded. Worse even when your acronym is comunityn generated. "Matz' Ruby Interpreter" likely wasn't named by matz himself.