People love naming things. Naming is powerful. You get to make the all-important branding decision. To dictate how your artifact will greet the world and colour people’s first impression.
My manager at work loves naming things. Specifically, being able to add to the pool of acronyms in the world. Surely a noble cause, given their scarcity in technology.
It’s not a good trend. By sacrificing clarity for brevity, plans and documents quickly degenerate into an incomprehensible gibber of FRCD ND MNGNGLSS CAPS, not unlike a cipher such as L337. Sometimes I think it’s deliberate, to make things sound more complex and impressive than they actually are.
This week we came up with a new utility: the Schema Attribute Tool. As giving it a catchy acronym is of vital importance, imagine my delight when said manager enthusiastically put forward “the SCAT” as an appropriate name.
“A tasty idea!” I chuckled, pointing him to the Wikipedia entry.
Lucky for him I’m not so naive.
I turned back to work my own project, the Java Engine Scalable-USer Primary-Information SyStem For Low Availability PoSitioning.
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