However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protocol" instead of http. And imagine if every url looked like "hypertext-transfer-protocol://world-wide-web.example.commercial/index.hypertext-text-markup-language". And if it had been given some other name, say "hyperprot" would that be any more meaningful than http?

Re: acronyms in English vs spanish.

I wonder if this is related to how human communication has a constant rate of information transfer. From what I understand, spanish is spoken faster, (more syllables per second) but has less information per syllable. One way that english is able to convey more information with less syllables is the use of acronyms and other abbreviations. And this is especially true for professional jargon that you use a lot to speak with colleagues at your job.

> You don’t see Kant writing TCI instead of “The Categorical Imperative” or Rousseau writing TSC instead of “The Social Contract”. You usually see the creation of concepts (Biopolitics by Foucault, Zeitgeist by Herder, Orientalism by Said) or the use of nominalization.

I don't think any of those terms are much better than acronyms. Maybe the name gives you a vague idea of what they refer to, but like many acronyms they are labels for complex ideas that you can't really understand just by knowing what it is called. And these terms can be, and are used for "in-group signalling" in much the same way as acronyms.

Finally, tech is not at all unique in its abundant use of acronyms. I don't know about in other languages but at least in English, Math, Physics, and astronomy also make heavy use of acronyms (ODE, PDE, QED, LCD, AGN, LASER, QCD, SI, CGS, AU, BEC, etc.) And from what I've observed medical and sales professionals also use a lot of acronyms.

There are at least a couple posters here with a clear background as USMC or similar whose insightful comments on geopolitics read like a sitrep from CENTCOM and get routinely called out to expand their acronyms.

American cultural affectations tend to take over on the Internet, and you know you’re talking with one when they expect you to be familiar with stuff like ACA (Affordable Care Act) or SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)

EDIT: spent 3 minutes on Reddit and they can’t stop going on about the USMNT. The only country to use an acronym for their football national team.

For example, I work in hospitality bookkeeping/accounting. Back in 2018 on a call with Chowly I learned Third-Party Online Ordering (TOOS) to refer to the then growing list of companies such as Caviar, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc.

Meanwhile I continued to hear from colleagues a variety of descriptive nouns such as, delivery platform, third-party delivery, delivery apps.

Which was OK, until the market diversified and actual delivery companies appeared, Relay chief among them.

So when someone spoke of delivery-something the question was are you talking about food ordering or food delivery platform?

Funny, but a controlled vocabulary goes with bookkeeping like peas with carrots.

As an aside, i have to spend some time on the phone with vendors and got tired of the dogs breakfast of words used to spell out a serial number or email, Irving-Boy-Momma, Ice-Ball-Monday, and other endless variations. Now I’m Nato compliant, haha. India-Bravo-Mike.

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)

LoRa (RF tech) vs LORA (AI optimisation technique) GLM (statistics) vs GLM (AI model)

For example, I work on a product that pulls data about plant species from various data sources. I'm not about to type "Global Registry of Introduced and Invasive Species" or "Global Biodiversity Information Facility" everywhere; everyone on my team, and pretty much anyone working in this problem space, knows them as "GRIIS" and "GBIF." If I wrote the names out every time, it'd probably be less clear to my audience: they'd most likely have to reconstruct the familiar acronyms in their heads to follow what I was talking about.

But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.

That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms

Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)