Microsoft is certainly not the only guilty party in this respect. Overuse of jargon and, more egregiously, failure to appropriately define all but the most universally well-known abbreviations at the point where the abbreviated form is first used in the text is a pervasive problem in the field. For example, the first few responses to this article use a total of four domain-specific abbreviations (IP, MSFT, VBA, and DSL), none of which were defined by the authors. Worse, within the field, the meaning of one of the abbreviations (DSL) is context-sensitive and the author's intended meaning is the lesser known one. The appropriate convention, used in virtually every other technical domain, is to explicitly state what the abbreviation or acronym stands for when it is first used in the text and then use it as much as you like in the rest of the text. Only a very small subset of abbreviations that are certain to be recognized by everyone in the field, regardless of their subspecialty, may be used without defining the term.
Somehow I find it difficult to believe that anyone who even knows about Hacker News, much less anyone who actually reads it would have interpreted the one comment to have said "any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms of a Digital Subscriber Line".
Unless there is some other computer-related meaning for the abbreviation DSL (besides Domain-Specific Language, of course) that I'm not aware of. :-D
The point is not that anyone would mistakenly believe that Digital Subscriber Line was the correct interpretation of DSL in that context. The point is that the nature of human cognition is such that Digital Subscriber Line is the term most likely to pop into consciousness first and it will be the wrong answer. The abbreviation DSL is not widely recognized as meaning Domain-Specific Language, or at least not so widely known that one may reasonably assume that any practitioner in the field will immediately know what you are talking about. They'll know that Digital Subscriber Line doesn't fit into context, but they won't necessarily know what meaning the author was trying to convey.
Not to disagree, but when I see DSL (and other acronyms of its ilk) I treat it the same as any other homonym.
In fact, when I read in general I read the whole sentence and parse it all together and not on a word by word basis. I thought most people read this way so that they are more resilient to typos and other small errors.
So if they simply do not recognize the term DSL->Domain Specific Language acronym, readers simply mentally flag it as a possible typo/other error instead of confusing the telecom notion with the um.. trendy ruby-world? term.
