I knew a guy (extremely smart, a PhD physicist) who, apart from writing Lisp in the style of Occam, who was fond of using synonyms - so a variable holding a str

I knew a guy (extremely smart, a PhD physicist) who, apart from writing Lisp in the style of Occam, who was fond of using synonyms - so a variable holding a stream would be called brook etc. I also knew another hyper smart chap who used to argue passionately for meaningless identifiers - his argument was that you couldn't actually represent anything meaningful about what an identifier was for in a short name so why try? Mind you, he was a MUMPS developer.