Comment by jacquesm

Look no further than /bin to see how strong such conventions can be. Mnemonics, function names (and filenames too!) were short because memory was super expensive and likely the first resource bottleneck you'd hit while building anything significant.

What you grow up with is what you consider to be normal and I totally get it why you'd balk at strstr or other cryptic names (or LDA or ls, for that matter) but to me they look perfectly normal and are part of my muscle memory. See also: QWERTY and the piano keyboard for mechanical analogues.