> There is a very good reason why, in coding, we give descriptive variable names such as "accountBalance" rather than "b".

In languages with an expressive typesystem you see a lot more single letter variables.

> We're not doing equations here, we're doing engineering

This sentence is nonsense.

> Conciseness is not a virtue in programming. Clarity is

I see what you are saying, but conciseness is also related to clarity, as I showed with the theorem.