Strongly agreed! This convention has even infected internal tooling at my company. Scripts end up with tons of cryptic three letter names. It saves a couple keystrokes but wastes engineering time to maintain
Pandas and Numpy are popular, sure. As is Tensorflow (often shortened to tf). But where do you draw the line, then? should the openai library be imported as oa? should flask be imported as fk? should requests be imported as rq?
It seems to happen mostly to libraries that are commonly used by one specific audience: scientists who are forced to use a programming language, and who think that 1-letter variables are good variable names, and who prefer using notebooks over scripts with functions.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Python gets so much attention from the scientific community, but I feel that small little annoyances like this creep in because of it, too.
import os as o
import sys as s