Oh, I see. You sound like an APLer. We have similar tastes, but many good programmers disagree, so I doubt that long variable names are a predictor of program b

Oh, I see. You sound like an APLer. We have similar tastes, but many good programmers disagree, so I doubt that long variable names are a predictor of program badness. Not every long name is FactoryManagerFactoryManagerFactory. Consider a language like K, in which variables usually have one-letter names. The real code-size win for K is not that. It's that the language is so powerful that complex things can be expressed in remarkably compact strings of operators and operands. (Short variable names, I'd argue, are an epiphenomenon. It's because the programs are so small that you don't need anything longer, and longer names would drown out the logical structure of the program and make it harder to read.) Token count is a good metric here. Both line count and byte count come out artificially low, but token count can't.