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I prefer type inference. It’s extra clutter that can often be abstracted away with good variable and method names. If it quacks the way I need it then that’s one less thing I need to hold context of in my head.
You should read the article, because it’s pretty much a direct rebuttal with justifications to this exact argument. You’ve really just re-stated what the article disputes.
Which isn’t to say you’re wrong, I’d just be interested in your response to the arguments.
My response to the article is that you’re sacrificing gains in language because some people use outdated tools. Code has more context than what is just written. Many times you can’t see things in the code unless you dig in, for example responses from a database or key value store, or literally any external api. Type inference in languages that have bad IDE support leads to a bad experience, hence the author’s views on ocaml. But in a language like Kotlin it’s absolutely wonderful. If needed you can provide context, but otherwise the types are always there, you can view them easily if you’re using a decent IDE, and type inference makes the code much more readable in the long run. I would say that a majority of the time, you do not care about the types in any application. You care about the data flow, so having a type system that protects you from mismatched types is much more important that requiring types to be specified.
Maybe I’m missing something:
Does type inference provide a practical benefit to you beyond saving you some keystrokes?
What tools do you use for code review? Do you do them in GitHub/gitlab/Bitbucket or are you pulling every code review directly into your IDE? How frequently do you do code reviews?
