TBH, when reading others' code, I would generally prefer a shorter name to a similarly informative longer name, as it definitely speeds up recognition. There a

TBH, when reading others' code, I would generally prefer a shorter name to a similarly informative longer name, as it definitely speeds up recognition. There are a few situations when this is the case: on top of my head, (i) function arguments, (ii) implementations of mathematical formulae that already have standard conventions for notation, (iii) cases when longer variable names are not well chosen and don't tell us much (e.g. his "processElements" function is far, far easier to read than "doSomethingWithCollectionElements"), (iv) situations when there are multiple long names that only differ in the last few characters -- again, I would much rather see "in_x" and "in_y" than "ThisHereInputCoordinateX" and "ThisHereInputCoordinateY", particularly if these are a part of a formula with a few other variables involved. Might be just me and how I read things, of course -- e.g. I usually print stuff in the smallest readable font, so that I can see more of the logic at the same time, and this is definitely not the case for all people.