C and Unix are from the early 1970s. They date from an era that predates the prevalence of large, bitmapped displays. There is a famous photo of Dennis Ritchi

C and Unix are from the early 1970s. They date from an era that predates the prevalence of large, bitmapped displays. There is a famous photo of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at a teletype in 1972 (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/teletype/ken-and-den.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/teletype/ken-and...). When the luxuries of modern IDEs, bitmapped displays, and high amounts of untapped computational power are unavailable, the programming environment and operating system need to adapt to the technologies that are available. The convenience of terse names is more pronounced in an environment of teletypes. On the flipslide, Smalltalk, also developed in the 1970s, has much longer names. But Smalltalk was developed for the Xerox Alto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto), an expensive machine with a bitmapped display, luxurious even by 1980s standards. Lisp also gradually embraced longer names as technology improved; compare the early Lisps of the early 1960s to Common Lisp, which first appeared in the mid 1980s. C and Unix are products of their relatively spartan environments from the early 1970s, whereas Java, a product of the 1990s, was influenced by Smalltalk, which was born under less austere conditions.