A nice editor/IDE feature might be to be able to use 2 names for a variable.
Short name for ease of typing and understanding when you are writing the code and a longer one for when you come back to it 6 months later or give it to someone else to understand.
Of course you would need to deal with collisions in a sensible way.
Something I have observed is that Java programmers seem to like longer variable names (sometimes hideously long) whereas C programmers often seem to use one, two or three letter names. Python/ruby seem to be somewhere in the middle.
Short name for ease of typing and understanding when you are writing the code and a longer one for when you come back to it 6 months later or give it to someone else to understand.
Of course you would need to deal with collisions in a sensible way.
Something I have observed is that Java programmers seem to like longer variable names (sometimes hideously long) whereas C programmers often seem to use one, two or three letter names. Python/ruby seem to be somewhere in the middle.