>In my Eiffel days, I was encouraged to write "integer", not "int", "character", not "char", and so on. I believe Java encourages this practice too. Supposedly clarity is maximized. But how can this be if we do the opposite when we speak? Do you say “taxi cab”, or “taximeter cabriolet”? Redundant utterances are tiresome and worse still, obscure the idea being expressed.

I see this argument a lot, and they strike me as people complaining because they don't use tools their language provides.

Typedefs are the answer to excessive name length, and they're nearly everywhere. Just create a couple typedef files, and import them as needed - future programmers get the full names easily, while you can program in your pseudo-K version of C for maximum keyboard efficiency. I have a handful of such files, they're endlessly useful - why write `Pop_froM_lIsT_WhIch_COntaiNs_speCiFik_type_X`, doing battle with naming-scheme-X that only employee-Y uses (and their associated spelling errors) when you can do so once, and write `pop` from then on, unambiguously?

The upside of typedefs for this comparison is that they're precisely what we do with spoken language - nobody knew what a "taxi cab" was until someone told them it the shorter version of "taximeter cabriolet", or until the full phrase was well enough known that it could be inferred accurately by the average person.