> First, there's a lot of equations used in graphics programming where the canonical names of variables are single letters. If you know the formula a single letter is a good name and it is expected that others reading it also understand it - if you didn't you'd have to read up on the formula anyway.

That's what I was getting at in my comment. A lot of the shader code I encounter is pretty math-y.

The rest I'm not too sure about .. I don't come across a lot of shaders that are code-golf-y trying to optimize for least number of bytes, but, then again, the article did just that .. so .. :shrug: