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Typescript is extremely good at this. Rust is pretty good. Even Java is okay now. I firmly believe type inference is the future. Most objects in dynamic langua

• hhas01 6y ago
  Type inference is good, but it’s not a full answer. For instance, how often do you declare a variable as `int`, when what you really want to say is “an integer in the range 0...100”? A few languages (e.g. Eiffel) provide a formal mechanism for declaring these sorts of constraints, but most don’t, and you end up putting what should be declarative type-level information into the body of your code instead. And then there’s “cutting-edge” stuff like dependent types, where you really want to express one argument’s type in terms of another argument’s, a classic example being an array indexing method, where you really want to declare the index at compile time as an integer in the range `0..<array.length`, and let the type system propagate that rule and its implications throughout the code that uses it. Whereas most “modern” languages chuck a run-time error if you’re lucky; or just ralph and dump stack like some antiquated 1970s throwback (yeah, looking at you, Apple’s Swift). 3/10 Could do much better.
• smichel17 6y ago
  Huh. I generally enjoy Typescript, but have been frustrated by its inference at times, particularly with regard to generics -- there are places where it will do fine if you pass an arrow function directly, but if you pull it out into a const, the compiler will no longer be able to infer types (and thus fails to compile if you have noImplicitAny enabled).
  • throwaway189262 6y ago
    I've found it's inference to be great, but the error messages GCC-like