[josephg]

Good variable names (and type names) matter for legibility. They should be clear, unambiguous, short, memorable and suggestive. Unambiguous is usually more important than short and memorable.

The word 'long' is ambiguous and unmemorable. And the type "word" is actively misleading. If you called a variable or class 'long', it wouldn't pass code review. And for good reason.

'Power' is an excellent example of what good technical terms look like. "Power" has a specific technical meaning in each of those fields, but in each case the technical meaning is suggested by the everyday meaning of the word "power". Ask a non-physicist to guess what "power" means in a physics context and they'll probably get pretty close. Ask a non-programmer to guess what "integer" means in programming and they'll get close. Similarly computing words like "panic", "signal", "file", "output", "stream", "motherboard" etc are great terms because they all suggest their technical meaning. You don't have to understand anything about operating systems to have an intuition about what "the computer panicked" means.

Some technical terms you just have to learn - like "GPU" or "CRDT". But at least those terms aren't misleading. I have no problem with the term "double precision floatingpoint" because at least its specific.

"long", "double", "short" and "word" are bad terms because they sound like you should be able to guess what they mean, but that is a game you will lose. And to make matters worse, 'long', 'double' and 'short' are all adjectives in the english language, but used in C as nouns[1]. They're the worst.

[1] All well named types are named after a noun. This is true in every language.

[bregma]

"long" and "short" are adjectives in C. The types are "long int" and "short int" and the "int" is implied if it's not present. A declaration like

    auto long sum;

Declares a variable named "sum" of type "long int" and of automatic storage duration.

The "double" comes from double-precision floating point. In the 1970s and 1980s anyone who came near a computer would know what that meant. Anyone who ever had to use a log table or slide rule (which was anyone doing math professionally) would know exactly what that meant.

There are good sound reasons for the well-chosen keywords. Just because one is ignorant of those reasons does not mean they were not good choices.

[_kst_]

Well, you can certainly think of "long" and "short" as adjectives, but the grammar doesn't treat them that way.

"long", "short", "signed", "unsigned", "int", "float", and "double" are all type specifiers. The language specification includes an exhaustive list of the valid combinations of type specifiers, including which ones refer to the same type. The specifiers can legally appear in an order. For example, "short", "signed short", and "int short signed", among others, all refer to the same type. (They're referred to as "multisets" because "long" and "long long" are distinct.)

[flohofwoe]

You really need to consider the context before making broad statements like this.

By your own standards, "word" and "long (word)" are actually excellent terms, because they're conventions used by the underlying hardware, and using the same conventions absolutely makes sense for a programming language that's close to the hardware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)