There's plenty of decent reasons imo. Its easier to parse and handle type inference (i.e. you don't need to do something silly like have a 'type' that just says

There's plenty of decent reasons imo. Its easier to parse and handle type inference (i.e. you don't need to do something silly like have a 'type' that just says "this thing is inferred" ala auto and var). You free up the left side a bit as well which means you can use something like val x = 4 instead of having to write final or const or whatever all over the place. I (and I'm sure most devs) can also just self infer the type of something based on how it's used, so I'd rather have the name of the thing first so I can move on with scanning the code than a probably obvious type. Also, if your type is something stupidly long (ex. Java) its really easy to read something like MyAbstractFactoryBeanImplBuilder while you have a bunch of stuff in your head and space out/forget something. Humans aren't good at keeping a bunch of things in their heads, so I'd much rather just have the names of these things and then types be as a reference to return to as a "oh wait, what was this thing again?" sort of deal.