People think differently and the higher up in the abstraction level, the more diverse it will get. Like for example some people think in shapes and will get crazy if you do not format the code in the same shapes. Others think in words and writes the code as like they where talking to a human. Others have images in their head and doesn't really care how the code looks. Some people annotate their code so that it looks like LLVM. Others think of real world items like containers, ships, streams, etc.
After being tasked to do the same repetitive job over and over I became very bored, and to make it fun I changed the variable name in one of the repos. The funny name stayed there as some sort of artifact and probably still haunts the poor people tasked to maintain it. And it has become a war story about that time when one of my colleges was tasked to make a routine change, but for the life could not figure out was was wrong, only to find out that repo had a different variable name...
So your college probably need some more challenge. Put him on binary (assembly) optimization or something, where he doesn't have to come up with variable names.
That said, naming things is probably one of the most difficult tasks in programming.
