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Yeah, I find this kind of abbreviation annoying. But there's a few words that are commonly abbreviated like this:

i18n -> internationalization

l10n -> localization

g11n -> globalization

l12y -> localizability

a11y -> accessibility

It bothers me because my brain does not jump from the abbreviation to the underlying word. I really need to stop and think about each one. And I get the numbers wrong when writing them.

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There was a period of a few months when I was first learning about web apps where I saw "i18n" multiple times. The first time I came across it, I tried to sound it out:

i18n -> I-one-eight-n -> iwonation

I was already a couple of rabbit holes deep at the time and didn't have the mental capacity to look it up and wrap my head around yet another new concept.

"Oh boy." I thought to myself, "One more word I've never heard of, probably representing some complicated CS concept."

I was so annoyed when I finally found out what was going on.

Wait, can you clarify what is actually going on? Is there any rhyme or reason or is are these shortenings just random?

I'm having trouble parsing the grandparent comment...

It's the number of letters between the start and end letters. Yeah, it's annoying.

Also, k8s->kubernetes

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