Why are some smart people so stingy, lazy, bad at maintainability, or whatever you want to call it? I have looked through a lot of the most voted solutions for many questions, and something common I've noticed is people tend to name their variables with one or two letters. Why do they do that? It makes it so much harder to understand their solution and using a real word or words as a variable name isn't more work. I do have to give them credit for being able to come up with such optimized solutions and share them with the community.