Top 10 Acronyms Every Developer Should Be Familiar With

The world of software development is filled with a countless number of various acronyms. These usually can't be used in public since people won't understand what you are talking about, but once a discussion starts among developers, knowing what a certain acronym actually means is a must.

There are literally thousands of them and being familiar with all of them is clearly impossible. Therefore, you can easily get lost when going through an article overstuffed with technical acronyms, so they should be used wisely.

In general, all the acronyms can be divided into two groups. One that is common for all developers, no matter what platform, are either for targeting something or for the programming language being used. The second is more specific and depends on many factors.

The following is the list of top 10 acronyms every single developer should be familiar with regardless of his other specifications.

API

An Application Programming Interface (API) is an exposed group of building blocks (routines, protocols, tools, and so on) that helps developers build software applications by putting these blocks together. The defined functionalities are independent from the underlying implementations, so they do not compromise each other.

Operating environments, hardware or applications, all these expose their own API to allow the desired interactions. That being said, there are literally thousands of APIs available like the YouTube API, Twitter API or Google Maps API to name a few.

GUID

A Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) is a 128-bit integer number used by developers to identify resources and for uniqueness purposes. GUIDs are usually displayed as 32 hexadecimal digits with several groups separated by dashes like "1310E308-66C0-439B-BC39-9FDF0984D2DC". There are several algorithms available to generate the identifier, so it is up to the developers which one will be used. GUIDs can be generated dynamically using an appropriate library, by using some online generator or built-in GUID generator inside your favorite IDE.

IDE

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a software application that allows developers to be effective when creating the software. IDE is basically the programmer's best friend and the modern ones offer all the tools needed to maximize the productivity. Components like source code editor, build automation, debugger or intelligent code completion are a must. They also provide many features for compiling, authoring, modifying or deploying the software. New features are always added to the newest versions.

While there are dozens of popular IDEs out there, Visual Studio for .Net development and Eclipse for Java are by far the most popular ones.

OOP

Object-Oriented Programming is a concept/paradigm based on objects and their behavior. This modern programming philosophy is a follower of the old procedural programming used in C or Pascal and it is basically the only one used by the current modern programming languages like C# or Java. The idea behind OOP is to create objects similar to real-world objects that interact with the world (application) and other objects. These objects are referred to as classes and their behavior as methods.