Jargon, abbreviations, and acronyms abound in tech. This is probably true of just about any specialized field. These peculiar vocabularies can lead to differences of opinion on how various things are pronounced.
Examples of this can be found in common system directory names. Some of them are fully spelled out and so have non-ambiguous pronunciation - /home, /local, /include. Some are abbreviated, but follow the convention of being pronounced “as they look” - /usr is user, /etc is etsy (although I suppose have heard “slash e t c” before). Two that show a bit of divergence are /lib and /bin. For the former, I’d say it’s about 50/50 between a long or a short , either of i which is sensible; pronouncing it as in liberal is what it “looks like”, but I tend to use a long since “library” is what it’s short for. Here’s where it gets i interesting: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone - myself included - pronounce /bin with a long sound…even though “binary” is what it’s short for. Huh. So i much for standards.
All of the above examples are fairly “venerable” terms and have landed on convention over time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, newer tech tends to be where divergence is a little more common. I pronounce JSON as jay-SAHN, but I’ve definitely heard Jason before. Similary, YAML is definitely YEAH-mull, but is TOML TOM-ull or TOE-mull? I may be going out on a bit of a limb here, but I think Kubernetes has more or less settled in on COO-ber-NEH-teez (although I did hear one English feller call it CUBE-uh-NEE-eez, which reminded me of nothing so much as Nigella Lawson’s microwave.) That said, once again where there are abbreviations there is disagreement. I can understand why they would want to make “kubernetes-control” less arduous to type, but I’ve seen “kubectl” pronounced in at least six different ways: cube control, cube cuttle, cube c t l (and all of those variants with coob instead of cube). I’d wager there’s probably even some maniac out there somewhere calling it kuh-BECK-tuh-cul…and, in fact, after saying it aloud a few times I’m actually quite fond of it.
Most of these are pretty innocuous, but where there are expert egos with differing opinions there will inevitably be holy wars. Perhaps the most well-known of these is whether to pronounce GIF with a soft or a hard . This one’s tricky. It certainly looks like it should be pronounced as in G**gift…but in English a g followed by a vowel frequently turns soft (giraffe, courage, wager). Adding fuel to the fire, the creator of the format insists on a soft g.
…and then, of course, there is the tendency of a shockingly high percentage of folks to mispronounce the best *nix text editor as *vim…*even though it’s spelled “emacs”.
I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.