>I'd like to raise a flag on those variable namings.
>
>There is a term that I use in some situations that I have seen many many times, it's what I call the "Big Red Bus Syndrome" (I thought everyone knew it, but I just moved to a new city where no-one's heard of it before).

This proves your point. I'll never have a variable called BigRedBus.

Having read all the answers so far (this is also for Vlad and others who responded), I've done a bit of backtracking, trying to remember how many of these funny variable names are still in use. Only one (vrana, i.e. the crow), and that's for historical reasons. All the others I could think of were actually eradicated - either by modifying the code, either by total rewrites of the app. So it seems I didn't agree with myself in the first place :)

>Would you even know what some of these meant in another two years if you were working elsewhre in the meantime and asked to return to your old department to fix some of your old code?

I said it takes ten minutes once or twice a year, when I deal with legacy code, written before our internal standards were set. But then, I'm in charge of porting old apps, tables and foreign data around here, so it's kind of normal for me. And, yes, I do curse the one who wrote it. We've given up one conversion lately, just because the writer of the old app had named his fields amnt1, amnt2, amnt3, ... to amnt8, and such stuff. That's what we call "dirty school (of programming)" 'round here.