Well, it would make all classes significant smaller - at
least it does in the class-file situation. All the
niceAndDescriptiveMethodName() methods and fields will have
their names decimated into something that does not take up
so much space.
And maybe in memory footprint? I don't quite know how the
memory-model/behaviour is.
I just tried creating some manual obfuscation of some dummy
classes. I made a class with a long (50 chars) class-name, long
(100 chars) field-name and long (130 chars) method name. A similar
obfuscated class was created with one character long names. Next, I
created 10000 instances of both (and kept references to all of
them), and saw that they consumed the exact same amount of
memory...
10000 object instances, or 10000 different classes? The length of
method names will not have any effect on the memory usage for each
object. Longer method names will make each _class_ consume more
memory, but in the context of a large application, the difference is
likely to be pretty negligable.