If you have the variables TodayYYYY, TodayMM, and TodayDD in your program, then you cannot also have a variable named Today, because it's fully self-contained in another variable. Why? Because it screws up global find and/or replace in a simple text editor.
Lots of people have told me that this is unnecessary with a good IDE, and lots have given me lots of common examples of violations of this rule, but I still like the rule (guideline). I like my source code to be portable, easily reviewed by even the simplest tools, and I like the common tasks (reviewing every instance of a variable in a program) to be easy.
One of the hardest things I ever have to do when reviewing someone else's code is to identify every use of a variable to find a bug or understand something. Violation of this guideline is the biggest culprit. (And violent, painful death to anyone who writes a 1200 line function wrapped with "for(a=b;a<c;a++){...")
This is also why all variables must be 3 characters or more, or it would be very difficult to adhere to #12.
(FWIW, my list comes more from many iterations than from any theory or philosophy. We can debate these forever. I just like to do what works for me. Use what you like, ignore the rest.)
I can think of a lot of exceptions to this though: x,y,z,i,j,t,dt,dx,in,out... all standard, least-surprise variables. In any software that processes images you just know what x and y mean, more clearly than if they were called column and row. Same for t and dt in anything that involves physics simulation. And a function like Vector add(Vector x, Vector y) really doesn't benefit from being called Vector add(Vector firstvector, Vector secondvector) or such.
I think the divergence in opinions may simply come from working in different domains. In business software, I imagine the types of data may be a lot more varied than in DSP software and such, so a longer variable name may help keep track of things.
If you use a text editor that supports regular expressions in a find/replace, you could match on word boundaries (e.g. \bToday\b). That would avoid the first part of the problem that #12 solves.
