Are mixed case like IaC or GoF in acronyms normative or allowed?

Question

In IT (Information Technology) there are a lot of acronyms with mixed case:

GoF: Gang of four, the oldest I found.
IaC: Infrastructure as Code, very common nowadays

I understand the logic behing using a lowercase for "as","of" etc. But since the oldest one I remember is "GoF" from the 90' I wonder if it was regular english or just an IT engineer habit:

Is it correct english?
When did it appear?
Is it specific to technological acronyms?

I did my research about acronyms and initials case, but no article are very specific when the case are mixed.

This is related but only about acronyms which became regular words:
When does an acronym lose its capitalization, e.g. RaDAR 'radar'?
It's about LiDAR and RaDAR but I didn't find other reference on it's usage with this specific writting.

For the final part of this, there are existing questions about whether to capitalise acronyms such as this. This question asks about Nato/NATO; someone asked a similar question about NASA/Nasa which was closed. — Stuart F, Mar 21 '23 at 10:30
Does this answer your question? Capitalizing prepositions in abbreviations? — Stuart F, Mar 21 '23 at 10:32
There's also a question about COVID/CoViD which discusses DDoS, and another about pascal case abbreviations that was closed as opinion-based. — Stuart F, Mar 21 '23 at 10:33
@StuartF Yes thanks, that the same question.... with 2 opposite answers. — pdem, Mar 21 '23 at 10:47

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 21 '23 at 10:48

It's true there aren't that many mixed-case acronyms outside the world of IT. And more often than not, articles and prepositions are omitted entirely: USA instead of tUSoA, and OBE in place of OotBE (Order of the British Empire).

One that does appear occasionally is DoD which is the Department of Defense, and WoW (World of Warcraft). Sometimes I see Lord of the Rings shortened to LotR but with the exception of DoD, and other government roles, titles, and departments, there is no hard-and-fast rule to using uppercase or lowercase for acronyms. For example, faqs or FAQS; asap or ASAP (as fast as possible) are commonly used.

Are mixed case like IaC or GoF in acronyms normative or allowed?

1 Answers1