Re: Pronouncible TLA's?

[Marshall]

Your post brought up some old memories.
I remember one guy who I met early in my career. He was a black-belt ASM guy. (Oh, see now we have a TLA that most CS folks would be able to pronounce....) Any way we had one machine that only allowed 5 capital letters max for the variable names. This guy had an amazing ability to come up with names that were very understandable in the context of the program. On a scale of 1..10, this guy was 15 (off the chart) and the average guy, 5. The difference was that big.

I was both stunned and inspired by this guy's coding ability. The code was amazing in its clarity of thought and the "names" worked. The point being that writing "good" acronyms is an art form. Some folks are way, way better at this than others. One device driver I worked with only had 2 comments! "Suck it in" and "Blow it out". But yet I could read the program and understand it. Very, very, very unusual for ASM code.

Instead of eliminating "unpronounceable" words, I would suggest starting with known pronounceable words. Perhaps it is possible to come up with some kind of "certainty scale"?

Any TLA that appears in the Oxford Dictionary is "pronounceable", bat, cat, rat, ate, tea, tee. etc. Word endings like "-ule" also qualify, like in "capsule", the "ule is pronounceable. That is 100% on the certainty scale. Note: some of these things might wind up being archaic and not really 100% by all native English speakers.

Some of these TLA's are pronounceable with insertion of a vowel, they become a word in the dictionary, LCK, "lock", "luck". These would have a lower score.

But I don't think any of these would qualify: xxa xxe xxi xxo xxu xxy xza xze xzi xzo xzu xzy.

"X" is often pronounced like "Z", "xxu", perhaps "zu" or "zoo". Ala: Xlinix, Xerox.

The humans probably would be needed to find things like ASM, "Assembly" although that might actually be in the Oxford Dictionary?

If you do go with my "crowd source" idea, throw some "easy ones" into each work unit. This is both a check on whether the human is paying attention and also a "positive re-enforcement" that the task is possible.