I’m willing to bet that descriptive names is a red herring, and the real difference in code quality were engineers who cared enough to review for such things.
Having worked on a pre-Fortran77 code base, names are a big fucking deal. Half the code was written before variable names could be longer than six characters.
The pendulum is swinging back from the overreaction to that, Java's famous AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. As awful as that name is, I will take it any day over L(IH+GV).
