A paper is a better specification for code than pretty much any design doc I've seen. It's usually not that hard to figure out what qp and qs and q_enc stand for from the context. It's much preferable to listening to the software engineers who want to explode a simple 10 character expression into an unreadable rats nest of line-continuation logorrhea.

It may be _possible_ to have a verbose variable that makes it obvious what it corresponds to in the paper, but I've never seen it. That really rings like a No True Scotsman argument to my ear. I much prefer the creole of latex style naming that most researchers tend towards. For example, take this code/paper pair

https://www.web.stanford.edu/~boyd/l1_ls/

The first line in the main loop is

    z = A*x-y;

Yes, they could have written

    residual = dictionary_matrix * optimization_variable - sensed_data 

or some such nonsense, but it is just exhausting to read. Further, it's actually more confusing because it conflates an application (compressed sensing) with what is actually a generic algorithm for l1 regularized least squares. This is a persistent problem with verbose names. In the search for an expressive name, people reach for names from a specific problem. This is a violation of separation of concerns.

I beg to differ. Having dealt with the insanity of abbreviated variables/field names in cancer research, I can tell you that abbreviations often (1) do not immediately indicate what the actual underlying field is, and/or (2) will mislead, especially when variants are involved.

I don't find your second example exhausting to read at all - in fact I find it far _easier_ to read, especially to an astute reader (who is trying to make sense of a particular scientific literature).

No person will have any idea what `z = A*x-y` could mean 'in context', when it's so damn abstract of a reference.

Brevity in variable names is horrendous when cross-checking against papers. It is also a waste of time for scientists to reiterate what the legends/variable names mean, especially when their code could have used clear, unambiguous, verbose names instead.