Numeronyms are fun, but they have one major problem: namespace collision.
What is a11y? Is it accessibility? Associatively? Axiomatically? Autobiography?
This is obviously a problem that needs solving.
My solution? SHAsum hashing.
We can avoid the ambiguity of "a11y" with this unique, cryptographically sound alternative:
Accessibility? a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y
Axiomatically? a20c4bcee8f977a3f5a3b6b499d52d7dd32584771y
Simple, easy to visually distinguish, everyone wins.
I was actually racking my brain for 'starts with a, ends in y, same length' words to make this dumb joke but then I remembered that /usr/share/dict has _huge_ flat-file lists of words of many languages in it, so I could just get them from that?
Ninety seconds of grep, awk and sort later, there it is. For future reference there's 223 of them, alphabetically going from abdominoscopy to axiomatically.
Y'all these computers have so much in them already. _So much_. But nobody knows.
I joke but a note about language usage and open source _cultural_ accessibility: Numeronyms are bad.
There's no meaningful distinction between "a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y" and "a11y".
Neither is recognizable as "accessibility" to anyone new to the field - great work nerds, we've managed to give the word "accessibility" its very own accessibility problem - and I gotta tell you, "not typing out long words because they're long words" seems childish as hell to most people.
Anyway, we took _the word "accessibility"_ and made it incomprehensible to new community members, look like a different, real but unrelated word if you use the wrong font or have weak eyesight, and screw over anyone using a screen reader.
We've made it harder for people who rely on accessible tech to so much as participate in conversations about them and the tech they rely on, to save able-bodied people a few keystrokes.
This is bullshit. There's no better term for it. It's just lazy bullshit.
@petrillic @mhoye I still see that in code from science/university backgrounds. Which is fine if your fellow scientists or faculty are the only ones who will ever read that code (and only in the next month or so before one forgets what variables g3_old, ph230nn37, and v_u stand for).
I can only imagine their work would be made much easier with more descriptive variables (and comments lol).
But there is probably historical/practical reasons why some communities will not use more verbose naming.
@petrillic @mhoye To be clear, I'm not talking about using the short forms of well-known math/physics/chem constants or names. [Although I'd still recommend spelling those out in the comments to quickly orient anyone new to the code or not especially familiar with the domain.]
What I'm talking about is super short names for variables, functions, classes, etc.
@petrillic @mhoye It *has* to make their work more challenging when going back to code after some time or trying to collaborate with fellow scientists and academics. (Right? 🤔)
Would love to read/hear perspectives from folks that have been in these communities and transitioned to/from the wider tech world.
I feel it's perfectly adequate to just take the first two characters of the hash. After all, there could never be a problem with "a88y", right?
You could even start an advice column entitled "Dear A88y"…
Having set out to riff a little on what I took to be the original intent of the post, a jocular suggestion to "cause less confusion" which would instead cause more confusion, I guess I can't complain that OP was in fact confused.
(For the record, my opinion is that the use of "88" by neo-Nazis is one of the more minor reasons to despise them, but it's on the list. I've seen it happen that someone was attacked on-line for having that in their username when it was, as people still sometimes do, their birth year, and I'm sure that kind of dissension is at least part of the intent behind it.)
@mhoye I hate Three Letter Acronyms ("TLA") for similar reasons.
They are...
+ elitist
+ exclusionary
+ domain specific
+ place an onus on the listener/reader to decipher
We have rich expressive languages that should be used to their full extent.
@mhoye It's worth noting that the earliest examples most people encountered were used for words that were self-referential problems: "i18n" (spelled as "internationalisation" where I am but not everywhere) et al
That made a certain kind of twisty sense for people who had to work with them. The same absolutely did not apply to "a11y" because if "accessibility" is your problem something's making plain text one.
I blame the use of i18n for "internationalization".
I think it was back in the mid 90s.
When everyone was scrambling to translate user interfaces to non-English languages.
I understand being lazy, and not wanting to type a bit of jargon over and over again, but then the "short cut" becomes the jargon, and opaque to new folks to the field.
Language changes, but I have to agree that "accessibility" going to "a11y" is an ironically bad choice.
@mhoye FWIW, I've seen the word a11y on social media for years and recognized that it was about accessibility but thought that it meant ally in leetspeak and was therefore really about telling able-bodied people how to be better allies to the disabled.
UPDATE: now looking at the other @-replies it looks like I'm not at all the only one.
We say HTML not HyperText Markup Language
And html has a fix of this too become searchable too: wrap <abbr> around all a11y and i10n done ✔️
@mhoye when I was a kid I loved a genre of books that was basically “here’s weird stuff you can do with household objects and chemicals, science is fun!” They weren’t focused on teaching chemistry or electricity beyond the absolute basics, but more about cultivating a sense of excitement and wonder.
I want that but for Linux.
@mhoye I saw someone excited about a GitHub Copilot feature that would "tell you which commits have previously changed a file".
Finally, through the world-changing power of AI, we have replicated `git log`
@mhoye I have two remote jobs, both of which use VSCode as standard editor for everything.
The amount of coworkers at BOTH jobs–one at a Fortune 500, one at a scrappy codeschool–who routinely copy paste JSON and navigate to jsonformatter dot whatever in their browser, instead of just pressing Shift + Alt + F... it makes my head spin.
It's like wanting to take a bath, leaving the bathroom, and dragging a garden hose inside to fill the tub. 😵💫
@mhoye Good points. I happened down this road a few years ago.
Sometimes I think we should have some voluntary "fully-stocked Linux distro + open data + isolated island w/ no Internet + see what you can create" teams out there for science.
Also I ended up really appreciating resources like this: https://github.com/first20hours/google-10000-english/tree/master
This repo contains a list of the 10,000 most common English words in order of frequency, as determined by n-gram frequency analysis of the Google's Trillion Word Corpus. - first20hours/google-1...
@mhoye so... it's a silly thing to ask.. but surely just typing the word is better than typing a hashtag that is 3 times the length of the word?
Or is that the joke?
mhoye
Kevin Boyd (he/him) 🇨🇦
november 🀄 in my mahjong era
Mikael Hansson
Christmas Tree
Riku Mattila 
Shawn K. O'Shea
Chris Petrilli
Jack Linke 🦄
Atomic Fox
cholling
https://j0̷.lol
slackline :emacs: :orgmode:
Jan D
Oriel Jutty 
Jens Nyborg
luna 
Gregatron5
Philippa Cowderoy
Euph0r14
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑
Pseudo Nym
Alon
alcinnz
LisPi
lil5 
🚲 🇳🇱
jnkrtech
Jack Jackson
yuki - queen of the snow
Nitin Khanna
xrvs
Catnip
Max 🏳️⚧️ 🍉 🪬 🔯 🏳️🌈 🖖🏻
Marc Carson
ErgonWolf
Patrizia
viq
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