Do Not Use Acronyms

Use of abbreviations is one of the greatest contributors to cognitive complexity I&#x27;ve seen in code. There&#x27;s been plenty of times that I&#x27;ve renamed the variables in a method and all of a sudden what was completely inscrutable is really very simple.<p>Acronyms are a particularly nasty subset of abbreviations because they&#x27;re accepted in discussion of business needs and even in tutorials and documentation.

I like Elon Musk&#x27;s approach and its blessing of widely-used acronyms. My industry both uses a ton of acronyms <i>and</i> requires that formal written work define an acronym the first time it&#x27;s used in a document. This requirement has no exceptions, even for widely-known acronyms like &quot;NCIS&quot;