I can relate to this despite being a native English speaker from the UK. I misspent my childhood in IRC and messing around with dozens of UNIX machines.
I can communicate well with people over the internet, but only recently have I met people in the flesh with similar interests to me. This means that I mispronounce jargon. Cache, deprecated, whenever I use words like these in conversation, people have no idea what I am talking about, I have only ever been exposed to them via text. I realised that I have never heard people say them before. This was probably not helped by the fact that I prefer an essay to a videoed talk any day.
I think the jury's still out on that one. I've always spelled it out (and I always will, dammit!), I've had professors either spell it out or pronounce it, and it very much seems to be a mix of regional preference and past experience. Of course, there's two arguments here: One is that SEQUEL was changed to SQL to avoid possible trademark issues (thus implicating that this also necessitated a change in the pronunciation), the other is that the original intent was to call it SEQUEL (thus this is the Only Way). Which is more correct? No one knows!
There's an interesting write-up on the differences[1] which I find interesting. There's even a fellow who asked one of the original developers[2] how to best pronounce it (spoiler: no resolution).
Come to think of it, I spell out most acronyms under 4-5 characters much to the chagrin of my peers (unless the intent was clearly to make it a word). I think it ought to boil down to preference.
I can communicate well with people over the internet, but only recently have I met people in the flesh with similar interests to me. This means that I mispronounce jargon. Cache, deprecated, whenever I use words like these in conversation, people have no idea what I am talking about, I have only ever been exposed to them via text. I realised that I have never heard people say them before. This was probably not helped by the fact that I prefer an essay to a videoed talk any day.