[markbnj]

> Having less characters makes code more readable (or rather "scannable") as well, it's just another tradeoff.

It might, in a specific circumstance, while in another circumstance it might make the code significantly less readable. That is an indication that number of characters is probably not a good metric for adjusting readability.

[zrobotics]

Couldn't agree more, sometimes too long makes things so much worse. I don't know why this is more common in Java code bases, but I've definitely seen function calls that take 6+ lines (have to maintain that 80 column limit) due to horrible naming. By the time I finish reading that, I've already forgotten what the base class is even called.

However, I've also seen large classes with members like "stN" for "set N". WTF is N, and why can't we just type set, that one char doesn't save anybody any time at all. Or nested loops with i & j reversed, just to make it especially painful.