You can argue that "it's not so bad, just learn it", but the confusion from domain-specific jargon can really add up, from my experience, and I think more under

You can argue that "it's not so bad, just learn it", but the confusion from domain-specific jargon can really add up, from my experience, and I think more understandable terminology is almost always better. I think that if we want to design a welcoming system, we should try to make it intuitive and limit the number of weird words that you need to "just learn". Imagine if every CSS property was some greek letter instead of a descriptive name. Experts could still use it, sure, but it would be even more hostile to beginners. Iota is particularly bad not just because it's hard to understand and remember, but because it's easy to misunderstand. In English, "iota" usually means "a little bit", so my initial guess (after re-reading it a few times to confirm it wasn't "itoa") was that it was a small float value, maybe some variant of epsilon. Relatedly, I'm a fan of Elon Musk's email against acronyms at SpaceX: https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cdd4ea1764 https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...