In early mainframe and DOS environments, there was a limit of 8 character names. You soon learned to work with abbreviations to create meaningful names. CNT would be a counter that might be part of a more descriptive name, such as LSTRXCNT for LastReceivedCount and LSTTXCNT for LastTransmitedCount. There was nothing slack about it - it was simply NECESSARY.
Once you have become proficient with such cryptic names, you tend to run with them quite comfortably.
I first started coding in 1977 and like you, I used abbreviations in the day out of necessity, like eight characters for the file name and three for the file extension in DOS. Some assemblers also had limited identifier lengths. But there is little excuse to do that these days. The world has moved on.
Its a bit like limiting the number of columns to 80 in source code to cater for 80 column dot matrix printers or old monitors. It is
.
You might run with concatenated abbreviations, but if you were writing code that the next poor bunny has to decipher after you left your job, you just make life hard for him. Some time ago I was asked to refactor 50,000 lines of embedded frogshit written by three ex-employees who were clearly out of their depth, so the issue is close to home. It took me 18 months to clean up the mess. In that code there were things like...
errrcntr = 0; // Set the error count to zero All they had to do was write...
errorCount = 0; and no idiotic comment implying "I am a moron" would be required. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Add in hundreds of function names that had little to do with the actual functions, and about 200 cryptic file names, and a plethora of bugs, you can see why my tolerance level for sloppy coding is low. There were several subsystems, and the writers constantly confused TX and RX both throughout the code and in the terrible schematics. Another favourite of theirs was using the prefix word "update", like
Update_serial(); The word "update" is ambiguous. The word "serial" is ambiguous too in this system (serial data? serial EEPROM? serial number?).