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

[andkon]

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?

[rwieruch]

API [0] - application programming interface

- not often explained when learning programming, but essential

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/what-is-an-api-javascript/

[deliriousferret]

KISS: Keep it simple stupid

[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.

[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).

[saurabhn → gtvwill]

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

[neilsimp1 → gtvwill]

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 → neilsimp1]

Australia, mid price private school in the country. I was blown away to have never had it expressed during school after learning it.

[wingerlang → gtvwill]

How come it was never taught?

[Leviter]

Definitely SOLID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design)

It contains: - SRP - OCP - LSP - ISP - DIP

[1ba9115454]

KISS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

[kojeovo]

PEBKAC

[hijinks → kojeovo]

as a ops person.. this is my favorite

[robin_philip]

CRUD - create read update delete ACID - atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability

[tmaly]

RTFM

[dikiaap]

LGTM, SGTM. Looks, Sounds good to me. WIP. Work in progress.

[probinso]

Pebcak is the only one you need

[boyter]

CAP

Consistency Availability Performance. At scale, pick any two.

[borplk → boyter]

"P" is for partition tolerance.

[biksnep → boyter]

Partition tolerance?

[joeclark77 → biksnep]

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".

[beamatronic]

FUBAR, WTF, SOL, SSDD, STFU, FML

[jaberwock1]

WET - Write Everything Twice

[NonEUCitizen]

NDA 83(b) IPO AMT

[savethefuture]

REPL, SOLID, DRY, CQRS

[tedmiston]

The various stack acronyms such as LAMP and MEAN.

[BjoernKW]

TLA

[laynetrain]

DRY