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Ask HN: What are the best acronyms that programmers should know?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best acronyms that programmers should know?

#21

Post by joeclark77 »

biksnep wrote: post #10
boyter wrote: post #9

CAP Consistency Availability Performance. At scale, pick any two.

Partition tolerance?

Yeah, it just means that you can distribute the system across a cluster. Since we only talk about the CAP theorem in the context of distributed systems, you have to assume "P" has already been chosen. So the theorem is really about a trade-off between "C" and "A".

Re: Ask HN: What are the best acronyms that programmers should know?

#22

Post by saurabhn »

gtvwill wrote: post #11

PEMDAS Mathematical order of operations. Parenthesis, exponent, multiply, divide, add, subtract. I only learnt this a year ago and it's almost embarrassing how much my maths or ability to understand math has improved from this(I'm 28 and never gotten taught this in schools general maths so I used to find math really difficult).

To complete the picture, you might've been taught a completely different mnemonic in other countries. The one I was taught was BODMAS ( "B"rackets, "O"f or "O"rder, "D"ivision, "M"ultiplication, "A"ddition and "S"ubtraction) and some African countries teach this as BIDMAS [0]. Caused a lot of confusion when I came to the US and drew a blank when someone mentioned PEMDAS in an example.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations#Mnemonics

Re: Ask HN: What are the best acronyms that programmers should know?

#25

Post by gtvwill »

neilsimp1 wrote: post #20
gtvwill wrote: post #11

PEMDAS Mathematical order of operations. Parenthesis, exponent, multiply, divide, add, subtract. I only learnt this a year ago and it's almost embarrassing how much my maths or ability to understand math has improved from this(I'm 28 and never gotten taught this in schools general maths so I used to find math really difficult).

I'm curious, where did you go to school. I remember learning PEMDAS in 6th grade (New York State) and it's been burnt into my brain since.

Australia, mid price private school in the country. I was blown away to have never had it expressed during school after learning it.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best acronyms that programmers should know?

#28

Post by [deleted] »

saurabhn wrote: post #22
gtvwill wrote: post #11

PEMDAS Mathematical order of operations. Parenthesis, exponent, multiply, divide, add, subtract. I only learnt this a year ago and it's almost embarrassing how much my maths or ability to understand math has improved from this(I'm 28 and never gotten taught this in schools general maths so I used to find math really difficult).

To complete the picture, you might've been taught a completely different mnemonic in other countries. The one I was taught was BODMAS ( "B"rackets, "O"f or "O"rder, "D"ivision, "M"ultiplication, "A"ddition and "S"ubtraction) and some African countries teach this as BIDMAS [0]. Caused a lot of confusion when I came to the US and drew a blank when someone mentioned PEMDAS in an example. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

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