Why do abbrevations like MERN, LAMP, MEAN etc. exist?
Is there something special about the combination of mysql, express, react, node that causes these technologies to work really well together? As far as I know the official documentation of these projects don't even mention the other ones. Why do people use these abbrevations in job postings?
Back in school, I remember my classmates and I would describe our hackathon tech stack with these acronyms to make us sound smarter when in reality all we did was a 5 min tutorial
The LAMP(P) abbreviation has been around for a long time and its origin simply comes from the fact that the single components were very popular and powered the majority of the web for a long time, and probably still do to a degree.
MEAN was a marketing thing that Mongo pushed hard for a while trying to position itself as the "modern" and simple noSQL option. I don't know if it came to be naturally and they leaned into it, or it was their doing entirely.
MERN is an adoption of MEAN, and it was only after that I saw these abbreviation become kind of a twitter culture thing, with everyone coming up with their own versions.
As more of a meta commentary, I would say abbreviating things in this way is an Americanism. I'm not sure what the historical origin of it is, but many political programmes, technical solutions, study memorization helpers etc are made into abbreviations in the US. Since the tech landscape is influenced heavily by the US, this practice has spread widely in the field too. Not necessarily a good nor a bad thing, just a curious detail I've noticed.