alt Hacker News> This field is full of it. Practices are promoted by those who tie their personal or commercial brand to it for increased exposure, and adopted by those who are easily influenced and don't bother verifying if they actually work.
Oh, the blasphemy!
So, like VB, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Mongo, etc? :-)
The superstitious bits are more like people thinking that code goes faster if they use different variable names while programming in the same language.
And the horror is, once in a long while it is true. E.g. where perverse incentives cause an optimizing compiler vendor to inject special cases.