This is common in the sciences as well, since senior professors also had the 8-character limit (from fortran [0]). And functions are also named this way as well

This is common in the sciences as well, since senior professors also had the 8-character limit (from fortran [0]). And functions are also named this way as well (see lapack/blas). Some people also hate typing out slightly longer variable names and what not. I try to emphasize that a section of code will tend to be read more times that it is written, and therefore readability is more important. It's a frustrating battle sometimes, though. [0] Exacerbating the problem of using the wrong variable is the fact that much existing code uses implicit types...