People who might realize, after becoming acquainted with Julia, for general computing, or maybe for some light usage of the math packages, might much rather have understandable names available, so they don't always have to run to the manual... With decent code completion in your editor, I don't think it takes any more typing...
Also, there would be much less problems of name collision (only if you loaded the abbreviations into your module would it become as likely as now). Just because those really short names (which had their roots back before IDEs with fancy code completion, when file names were limited to 8.3 (or 14 in Unix) characters), became traditional, like the names of the C functions, doesn't mean that they are necessarily *good* names... I would definitely complain about the cryptic names in C more, if there were thousands of them with short names... but as the set of functions that I'd use is very small, and generally fit a few simple patterns (such as mem*, *printf, *alloc [I'd never use the str* ones that expect \0 terminated strings anyway]), it doesn't bother me that much.
