Kevlin Henney - of Curly Bracket Languages fame has a good video of his presentation at a recent NDC conference Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers. As usual a very entertaining talk, but Kevlin is also spot on in identifying ways in which we are lead to make incorrect decisions about the code we are writing.
In it he references a paper from Rob Pike Notes on Programming in C. Although Rob Pike wrote that paper back in 1989 it is still relevant, as can be seen by his words about variable names:
Length is not a virtue in a name; clarity of expression is.