Why do you think that "much shorter" implies "more understandable"?

I think we have a lot of experience to suggest otherwise.

Anyone who has had to maintain old Fortran or C code will likely know what I mean. With some early implementations limiting variable and function identifiers to 8 characters or less, we'd see a proliferation of short identifiers used. Such code is by far some of the hardest to work with due to variable and function names that are short to the point of being almost meaningless.

Then there are languages like APL and Perl, which make extensive use of symbols. APL has seen very limited use, and Perl code is well-known for suffering from maintenance issues unless extreme care is taken when initially creating the code.

Balance is probably best. We don't want excessively long identifiers like is often the case in Java, but we surely don't want excessively short ones, either.