Not only more readable than A and B but I would argue it's also easier to remember who did what a few sentences or paragraphs earlier since Alice and Bob invoke slightly less generic mental images than A and B. For example one is a woman and the other one is a man, maybe even some person or character you know.
And now that I'm thinking about it, the different gender also makes it easier to keep track of who does what because different pronouns are used (at least in English and many other languages).
If you ever go to r/relationship_advice and read posts where their friend T did S with P and then A (23 F) got into with G, then yeah...Alice and Bob suddenly makes a lot of sense.
this, but doubly so with Eve. You'll notice that we often skip over Cindy and Dave and go right to Eve, so often that I don't even know off the top of my head whether Charlie and Deandra are the conventional names for persons 3 and 4 in this construct. That's because this construct is used a lot when talking about secure communications and the convention is that "evil" "eavesdropping" Eve is the person trying to destroy, intercept or alter the communication between Alice and Bob. Her role is built into her name.
I hate foo bar etc, seems like a joke that was cringe that has gone on too long. When I was trying to learn programming I was like what the actual hell does this shit mean?
I used to have a big list of gender ambiguous names I'd use for examples. So I'd use "Alex" and "Blake" or something like that. It also had some non-anglo names on it, just to spice things up.
In comp sci papers there's a few other common example people. "I" for intruder or imposter (Irene, Isaac). "M" often for malicious or middle-person (Mal). There's a few more im forgetting now.