If you call a variable tau in production code then you're being overly cute. I know what it means, because I watch math YouTube for fun, but $future_maintainer in all likelihood won't.
If you call a variable tau in production code then you're being overly cute. I know what it means, because I watch math YouTube for fun, but $future_maintainer in all likelihood won't.
Where do you draw the line then? Stopping at `tau` just because `$future_maintainer` might get confused feels like an arbitrary limit to me.
What about something like `gamma`? Lorentz factor? Luminance multiplier? Factorial generalization?
Why not just use the full sentence rather than assign it to an arbitrary name/symbol `gamma` and leave it dependent on the context?
And it's not that hard to add an inline comment to dispel the confusion