[dTal]

One-letter variables aren't always bad coding style. Some single letters are meaningful. It's conventional to use 'i' for an array iterator, for instance - or i and j for two dimensional iteration. x,y, and z are cartesian coordinates. It would be downright perverse not to call the base of the natural logarithm 'e'.

And so it is with greek letters. Many of them carry intrinsic meaning, or a loose collection of related meanings - they effectively are labels. It's not that people want to write dense and impenetrable code, it's that they would rather write μ than coefficient_of_friction because that is its proper name and how it appears in formulas and textbooks.