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Ask HN: What are the best acronyms that programmers should know?

11 points by andkon ↗ HN
I just discovered YAGNI — "You aren't gonna need it" — and facepalmed at all the time I would've saved if I'd really internalized that lesson sooner. Apparently, it's a frequent enough problem that it's now an acronym.

What else should I be liberally referring to as I try to improve my practices?

28 comments

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tedmiston
The various stack acronyms such as LAMP and MEAN.
boyter
CAP

Consistency Availability Performance. At scale, pick any two.

biksnep
Partition tolerance?
joeclark77
Yeah, it just means that you can distribute the system across a cluster. Since we only talk about the CAP theorem in the context of distributed systems, you have to assume "P" has already been chosen. So the theorem is really about a trade-off between "C" and "A".
borplk
"P" is for partition tolerance.
gtvwill
PEMDAS Mathematical order of operations. Parenthesis, exponent, multiply, divide, add, subtract. I only learnt this a year ago and it's almost embarrassing how much my maths or ability to understand math has improved from this(I'm 28 and never gotten taught this in schools general maths so I used to find math really difficult).
neilsimp1
I'm curious, where did you go to school. I remember learning PEMDAS in 6th grade (New York State) and it's been burnt into my brain since.
gtvwill
Australia, mid price private school in the country. I was blown away to have never had it expressed during school after learning it.
saurabhn
To complete the picture, you might've been taught a completely different mnemonic in other countries. The one I was taught was BODMAS ( "B"rackets, "O"f or "O"rder, "D"ivision, "M"ultiplication, "A"ddition and "S"ubtraction) and some African countries teach this as BIDMAS [0]. Caused a lot of confusion when I came to the US and drew a blank when someone mentioned PEMDAS in an example.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations#Mnemonics

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robin_philip
CRUD - create read update delete ACID - atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability
sh87
Looking for acronyms is a waste of time, let alone save you time. Just make enough mistakes fast enough to learn from them. And Let The Acronyms Be Alone. ALTABA.
dikiaap
LGTM, SGTM. Looks, Sounds good to me. WIP. Work in progress.
probinso
Pebcak is the only one you need