Understanding the Postgres Hackers Mailing List Language

Reading an established open-source project's developer mailing listmay leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. GregSabino Mullane has written up a valuable explainerfor those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (pgsql-hackers)mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well:

The mailing lists are full of acronyms and jargon that might not befamiliar to younger people who did not grow up on email (although textmessages have inherited many of the abbreviations). If you are anon-native English speaker, or under the age of 30, or not steeped inthe world of tech, I offer some solutions below.

To do this, I downloaded the last year's worth of hackers email,wrote a program to strip out all the non-human stuff (headers, codeblocks, attachments, etc.), and then did some data analysis on theresults.