In my experinece, veryLongVariableNamesThatContainADetailedExplanation are almost always a sign that someone didn’t quite know what they were doing.

Unfortunately, short names do not indicate that someone did know what they were doing! =)

Yes. I currently work in a codebase where the previous tech lead did that and promoted such behavior (among many other insanity-inducing practices).

There are many, many developers who are, deep in their hearts, "programmers"--someone who creates a plan of action, a program, for very complex machines to follow. They are skilled at discerning The Right Way to solve a problem. Actually, THE Right Way. And since they are Programmers, the Right Way is to find the Best Way to tell the computer what to do. Computers are completely oblivious to comments, so they aren't The Best Way. Comments are ambiguous, so they can't be THE Right Way. Computers parse identifiers, so a good variable name is telling the computer _something_ at least, and so is vastly preferrable to comments. If there's a mismatch between comment and code, the code is Reality so the comment must be wrong, and is thus misleading and worse than useless.

In reality, of course, software development is about getting large groups of people in-sync as to problem, solution, and implementation. That takes lots and lots of communication. Ambiguous, messy people-to-people stuff, without The Right Solution to contents or wording. Because there's a bias towards thinking of the Program as Reality, it never occurs to such developers that an identifier can become just as outdated or wrong as a comment, and in fact it is easier to correct a comment than to globally rename identifiers, or that a 20-word comment carries vastly more information and nuance than a 20-character function name, or that trying to shoehorn information important to developers into a language used to tell _computers_ how to function is worse than trying to drop assembly language into a SQL query.

> Computers parse identifiers, so a good variable name is telling the computer _something_ at least, and so is vastly preferrable to comments.

I realize you're trying to explain a way of thinking that you don't actually share—but this doesn't make sense to me either.

Computers parse identifiers in only the simplest sense—they care if two identifiers are identical to each other or different. So, any identifier longer than one or two characters is in some sense a comment, because everything longer the minimum necessary to make the identifier unique is ignored. They're literally stripped from the output if you don't retain debug symbols or use a minifier (depending on the type of language).

This is griefing your coworkers who would actually do that?

I wasn't being sarcastic, if that's what you mean. (And I'm not a professional programmer, so my coworkers don't write code.)

To me, the suggestion seems so incredibly bad that it leaves me wondering about the headspace of someone who would suggest that. Is it somehow less bad than it seems?