Recycling of acronyms?

Once upon a time IT had meaningful acronyms that did what any good acronym
should do; helped you remember what the thing they stood for was about.

We have covered things like the Very Silly Access Method being less silly
than its predecessor Incredibly Silly Access Method at length here in the
past, but today I noticed a more disturbing trend.

Some acronyms NO LONGER MEAN WHAT THEY STAND FOR!

Now, you'd think that such a thing kind of defeats the whole object of an
acronym.

I can't decide whether the rising generation simply aren't capable of
original thought and are therefore unable to come up with acronyms that DO
mean what they stand for, or whether it is just laziness...

SOAP (the Simple Object Access Protocol) officially no longer means that.
See, as it developed it stopped being 'simple'. OAP doesn't have the same
ring to it and COAP (Complex Object Access Protocol) is kind of offputting
to people who are putting a toe in the water with OOP, so they left it as
SOAP 'cos they just couldn't COPE... :-) What DOES it stand for now?...
er...nothing. It is just a word to identify a certain protocol.

Doesn't wash with me...:-)

I've been using SOAP long enough not to be too bothered by this, but now I
see that OLE (Online Linking and Embedding) the MS technology which allows
you to link or embed one object within another, has also been officially
decommisioned. At first I thought this was because it was becoming obsolete
due to COM and Automation, but no, it is alive and well, with the same
acronym it always had, but it isn't the same thing any more...

I know people have had trouble with some of the posts I've made here in the
past about OO, where the terminology was not necessarily well-defined.
(We've had discussion about what I mean when I say 'component' for
example,and most here don't understand why COM is so dear to my heart :-))

So, here's a brilliant list of definitions from my world, provided by those
nice people at MicroSoft...only thing is, the acronyms for them may not mean
what you think...
http://go.techtarget.com/r/480512/4951921

Pete.


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