Is there an excuse for short variable names?

Re:Is there an excuse for short variable names? by martinced on Saturday February 02, 2013 @06:39PM (#5157844)

I think that the second most upvoted answer is right on spot: variables that a short lifespan should be shorter than the ones having a long lifespan.

Of course when you're working in a functional language you basically only have short lived "variables" (they're not even "variable" but whatever). Even better yet, in some languages you don't even need that many variables.

The recent voted article about the guy refactoring Java code to Clojure was precisely an example of that.

So why even have "variables" when you can very often do without!?

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Re:Is there an excuse for short variable names? by lutusp on Saturday February 02, 2013 @06:47PM (#5157860)

> So why even have "variables" when you can very often do without!?

In many of those cases, as often as not, the problem of variable names is replaced by the problem of function names, and we're back to square one.

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