They're usually working from text/notes in mathematical notation and are trying to match the math notation as best they can. I'm sure programming not being the

They're usually working from text/notes in mathematical notation and are trying to match the math notation as best they can. I'm sure programming not being their profession may be part of it, but I find myself doing the same thing when implementing algorithms described in mathematical notation. Due to the shear number of variables in a lot of algorithms, it's difficult to give each one a good name. And even if you did, it's unlikely the code would make any more sense, in order to grasp what's going on, you'd likely need some text on the subject to explain how it works.