Rich Hickey also came to mind, but a different talk[0]. There he talks in part about software stability and how spec (the primary way to encode data and functi

Rich Hickey also came to mind, but a different talk[0]. There he talks in part about software stability and how spec (the primary way to encode data and function contracts in Clojure), is about communicating what is required and provided by a function or library (among other things). Rust's decision to make signatures mostly explicit (sans lifetime parameters here and there), is self-documenting and useful, but most importantly it creates an explicit contract that people can rely on. Rust code adheres to semantic versioning so at least it will also adhere to not breaking callers without bumping the major version. Which the further discussion in the talk do not agree with. But the fundamental decision to make signatures explicit at least enables people to write stable software. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk