I dabbled in this when I wrote an iOS game for fun. It was pretty surprising how quickly variable names got out of hand. Random iOS class name: AVPlayerItemLegibleOutputPushDelegate[0]. Then you try and make instances of it and you obviously don't want to prefix the class name with something or risk growing the name even more. And god forbid you try and extend the class and then make an instance of that using prefixes to indicate more specific objects.
I've heard stories about one year at WWDC's Stump the Experts, they discussed the longest method name in ObjC land. I wish I had been there. I also wish I was going to be there tomorrow, but alas, the marketers and bosses have taken over.
Haha I am also a Java programmer. To be honest, I try and keep things as brief as possible, but I almost never sacrifice readability for brevity. So, I'll admit, some of my variable names get a bit lengthy at times; however, that is for all languages I program in, not just java.
Which is why when you see a codebase like Plan 9/9front's, you can't help but be in awe.
Most of their lines are incredibly compact. In fact, a lot of people who first read the code suffer a bit of a culture shock. It's just too... simple, and readable. Especially for C. This causes some to knock their own particular style of ANSI C as inadequate.
I think it's a testament to their genius. You'll probably never find a codebase as massive yet as readable and grokkable as theirs. If you're used to modern Linux code that copiously uses glib, D-Bus and a whole bunch of other libraries, you'll either find it a huge breath of fresh air, or completely blasphemous.
Hey, leave those guys alone: It's Objective-C who has the biggest names of them all. It's class names that are huge anyhow in Java. Both are huge in Objective-C (class and variable)