> So having to write type annotations all the time is an advantage for you? Well, there are very interesting tradeoffs here. If you want to go the "whole hog",

> So having to write type annotations all the time is an advantage for you? Well, there are very interesting tradeoffs here. If you want to go the "whole hog", i.e. HM type inference, where you don't need to annotate the types of parameters, you can't have subtyping (at least not in the usual sense yes yes I know about OCaml which requires an explicit upcast). Now, I personally think subtyping is great, and it's even greater when you introduce first-class union+intersection types into the mix. So there's definitely a place for languages without full HM type inference. Next, you could still have a system with more type inference than what Ceylon supports, but you would need an arbitrary number of passes over the code to infer types, and you would introduce the possibility of typing errors which can't be pinned down to a single erroneous expression. So Ceylon supports a more limited sort of type inference: local type inference. The Ceylon compiler can infer and check all expressions in a single pass over the code, and every typing error is localized to a single expression. And y'know what: that turns out to be a pretty reasonable thing practically speaking, since documenting the types of exported APIs is frankly a good thing to do anyway, and helps the people who come along later and look at your code.