Scientific evidence that supports using long variable names instead of abbreviations?

Posted by Sebastian Dietz on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Sebastian Dietz
Published on 2011-01-03T14:26:59Z Indexed on 2011/01/03 16:00 UTC
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language-agnostic

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coding-style

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naming-conventions

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variable-naming

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variable-names

Is there any scientific evidence that the human brain can read and understand fully written variable names better/faster than abbreviated ones?

Like

PersistenceManager persistenceManager;

in contrast to

PersistenceManager pm;

I have the impression that I get a better grasp of code that does not use abbreviations, even if the abbreviations would have been commonly used throughout the codebase. Can this individual feeling be backed up by any studies?

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