hmm, I guess this is the difference between numerical programming and the rest -- sure, if I was writing a database server or something it would be great to have thisObject.veryLongName to know what everything is -- however when you are implementing a model from a published paper, the variables tend to be single greek or roman letter names, possibly with subscripts and superscripts, and it helps if the name you see on the screen is the same as the name on the paper, as is the case in matlab. You want the equation on screen to look as similar to the one on the paper as possible, especially if its going to be read by another programmer who is familiar with the paper.
Maybe for now I will just fix up my emacs to display the world 'self' in 10% gray... :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
