Replying to myself because I decided I have more to say: Imagine if a coder wrote a big huffy blog post declaring that he was only going to use single-characte

Replying to myself because I decided I have more to say: Imagine if a coder wrote a big huffy blog post declaring that he was only going to use single-character variables everywhere because it was more "minimalist" than using descriptive variables. He'd be hanged. Obviously what "fat" is deciding to do with semicolons is less annoying than the strawman I just made up, but I don't think it's entirely dissimilar. The Javascript spec doesn't say that you must use descriptive variables, and using single character variables is certainly valid. However, it's an established convention that we just don't do that, because people find it irritating. Basically this just comes down to "plays well with others".