I find that single letter variable names (or 2-letter names for that matter) really only work if both your coding style and your language allow it. You have to

I find that single letter variable names (or 2-letter names for that matter) really only work if both your coding style and your language allow it. You have to write short functions (5-20 LOC or something like that) in a language that encourages that style. C, Go, LISP, and Haskell (and many more) are great for this kind of thing. But object oriented languages like C++ and Java tend to have much longer functions (50-100 LOC isn't uncommon). I'm not sure the fact that they're object oriented has anything to do with that though.