You are right. But these problems can be solved using annotations. Your comment helped me to narrow my complaint: While functional languages require annotation

You are right. But these problems can be solved using annotations. Your comment helped me to narrow my complaint: While functional languages require annotations for things that are not obvious (when to subclass, when to change the type of an object, what overload should I use) and infer the obvious ("n*fact(n-1)" is an integer); C++ infers the non-obvious and requires you to add annotations on the obvious! Phrased that way, it is striking.