I appreciate this way of programming - also, if I may, in the age of auto-complete I think it's okay to have verbose variable naming. Imho, it's perfectly fine to have quad, quadVelocity, dragMagnitude, etc.

I see this a lot in the wild, though - as an honest question (not trolling!) why do people still shorten their variable names in place of having a terse descriptor ?

I tend to have shorter names for function scoped variables. Wider the scope - more descriptive the name. Short names are good to have more concise code and more logic fitting into a line width.