[kalaksi]

> strictly speaking not wrong, but many times slower to absorb. (I think most developers screech to a halt and their brain goes "is there something funny going on in the logic here that would necessitate this?")

I agree with this, but can't see how this applies to variable naming. Variable names can be too long, sure, but in my opinion, very short non-obvious variable names also make scanning and reading harder since they are not familiar shapes like more complete words. Additionally, when trying to understand more deeply, you have to stop and read code more often if variable's meaning is not clear.

That said, 1-2 char variable names work well in short scopes, like in some lambda, or when using 'i' for an index in a loop (nested loops would depend on situation), but those are an exception.

Like always, this is probably subjective too. And well-organized codebase probably helps to keep functions shorter, but there's often not much I can do about the existing codebase having overgrown functions all over.