Even there, context matters. For example, lambdas in functional languages. In that case it's generally agreed that single-letter variable names are very much p

Even there, context matters. For example, lambdas in functional languages. In that case it's generally agreed that single-letter variable names are very much preferable to descriptive ones. For one, in the cases where lambdas are normally used, verbose naming can actually make the code harder to understand by disrupting the formatting of the code in which the lambda is embedded. Also, it creates a nice built-in code smell: If the lambda statement is complicated enough that its purpose is hard to understand without descriptive variable names, that's an indication you should be using a named procedure instead.