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The original compiler ran on a platform was heavily resource constrained (very little memory, slow terminals).

If all you have is a 300 baud terminal (a luxury for some early users), writing a 30-letter statement takes about a second. Doubling that speed by using shorter identifiers is worth it (certainly as long as all the people reading the code either wrote it, or have the writer sitting next to them)

That created a culture that persists to today.

There are different cultural streams such as Apple’s one, which originated in Pascal (for the original Mac OS). Consequently (I think), Apple’s C headers later on weren’t afraid to use identifiers with over 40 characters. Next step/Cocoa similarly aren’t afraid of long names (https://mackuba.eu/2010/10/31/the-longest-names-in-cocoa/)




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