5 ms·

What's striking to me is that we have the abbreviation "i18n" for internationalization, and "a11y" for accessibility. From the perspective of a typical young Am

What's striking to me is that we have the abbreviation "i18n" for internationalization, and "a11y" for accessibility. From the perspective of a typical young American software development team, these are two instances of "making software work for those other people that aren't quite like us". Is it a coincidence that (1) both of these concepts got cumbersome words, and (2) both of these words were abbreviated in the same way?

lobster_johnson 14y ago
I think you're reading too much into it. "i18n" exists because, frankly, it's too long; it's a 20-letter word, one of the longest in common usage, and it's boring and time-consuming to type, and easy to mistype. There is a long tradition in hacker culture to shorten and optimize things whenever possible, going back to the early days of Unix and C ("sh" for shell, "rm" for remove and so on). The reason i18n has a number is that it's awkward to abbreviate without; the C/Unix-style tradition of removing vowels to abbreviate would render it unreadable ("intrntnlztn"? "intrlzn"?). Case in point: One of the companies I co-founded, Transparensee, has a very long name. Internally we started referring to it as t11e everywhere, including the domain names we use for dev stuff (t11e.com works as an alias for transparensee.com). Edit: We also have l10n (localization) and m17n (multilingualization), incidentally.
- hackmiester 14y ago
  I feel like "intl" would be a good abbreviation.
  - lobster_johnson 14y ago
    That just means "international", which does not capture the essence of what it is. It would have to be something "intlzn". But since we already have established i18n, there is no need to coin a new abbreviation.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
mpyne 14y ago
No dude, you're right. Some Americans made a backroom deal to maliciously and deliberately assign cumbersome words to the topic of making more money from export sales and bum-standard customer service. P.S. you forgot to include "l10n" for localization in your description of the conspiracy.
- caseysoftware 14y ago
  Psst.. in the secret meeting last week we decided to start abbreviating it as "c8y". Please update your records.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Understood, and thanks for backfilling me on the progress of our c8y. See you next week.
- dmckeon 14y ago
  Note that eliding the middle of some long words also avoids making a choice of Websterian or British spelling, giving us, for instance, p13n for personali{s,z}ation without having to locali{s,z}e the terminology, or to have a {flame war,frank and open discussion} over the spelling.

lobster_johnson 14y ago

I think you're reading too much into it. "i18n" exists because, frankly, it's too long; it's a 20-letter word, one of the longest in common usage, and it's boring and time-consuming to type, and easy to mistype. There is a long tradition in hacker culture to shorten and optimize things whenever possible, going back to the early days of Unix and C ("sh" for shell, "rm" for remove and so on). The reason i18n has a number is that it's awkward to abbreviate without; the C/Unix-style tradition of removing vowels to abbreviate would render it unreadable ("intrntnlztn"? "intrlzn"?). Case in point: One of the companies I co-founded, Transparensee, has a very long name. Internally we started referring to it as t11e everywhere, including the domain names we use for dev stuff (t11e.com works as an alias for transparensee.com). Edit: We also have l10n (localization) and m17n (multilingualization), incidentally.

hackmiester 14y ago
I feel like "intl" would be a good abbreviation.
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  That just means "international", which does not capture the essence of what it is. It would have to be something "intlzn". But since we already have established i18n, there is no need to coin a new abbreviation.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

mpyne 14y ago

No dude, you're right. Some Americans made a backroom deal to maliciously and deliberately assign cumbersome words to the topic of making more money from export sales and bum-standard customer service. P.S. you forgot to include "l10n" for localization in your description of the conspiracy.

caseysoftware 14y ago
Psst.. in the secret meeting last week we decided to start abbreviating it as "c8y". Please update your records.
- mpyne 14y ago
  Understood, and thanks for backfilling me on the progress of our c8y. See you next week.
dmckeon 14y ago
Note that eliding the middle of some long words also avoids making a choice of Websterian or British spelling, giving us, for instance, p13n for personali{s,z}ation without having to locali{s,z}e the terminology, or to have a {flame war,frank and open discussion} over the spelling.