Really depends on the agency to and the emergency at hand. For example, you may want the CDC to have priority access to resources during the zombie apocalypse, so that you can get recommendations on whether you have to kill the guy that got bitten, or if its only a problem if he dies of other causes.

At least a small part of the reason is due to the fact government agencies are just now finally growing their web presence at a rapid pace as part of the open government initiatives. Figuring out at what scale they are going to be growing would be a huge pain over telling Amazon / Terremark (where large portions of current cloud infrastructure reside) "hey we need more processor/ram/storage". There are large amounts of thought, planning, and contract work that would have to be put into building a proper infrastructure. When I last dealt with real servers, they were running a bunch of solaris boxes that were barely usable, but technically had the specs they needed, so they weren't about to upgrade them or build new boxes.

Most of these complains are entirely valid.

C has a different style convention because it comes from a time when program performance was the key issue, hardware costs were high and programmer costs were low.

Java-like conventions are around because hardware costs are low and programmers are what costs more. It is more efficient to have a programmer spend less time working on a project then have everything small and tidy.

On this note, however, method/variable names are treated the same by the compiler no matter their length, so having long names that describe an issue well come at no hit to efficiency.

One of the most important things for code understandability is modularity, breaking code into well defined sections that make it clear what each part of the program is doing- and is responsible for.

One-liners should be reserved for command-line run once scenarios.