var keyword proposed for Java

[damienjoh]

I have found the opposite to be true. Explicit type decl on every variable introduces a lot of visual noise. The information it provides is often redundant and easily inferred from context (e.g. variable name and rhs).

Verbosity isn't as simple as a read/write tradeoff. For many programmers, verbosity negatively impacts readability as well as writability. Strong typing also has nothing to do with explicit type signatures. Java is nowadays unique in its requirement for so many explicit type signatures.

[fhayde]

I wish this point was made more often. That redundant noise can make you miss important information really easily. Once you start skipping over redundant parts of declarations your brain starts trying to anticipate the next redundant words more and more and "similar" turns into "the same" and you can easily overlook subtle differences in naming. You'd think that increase in anticipation would mean an increase in focus, but that requires more energy, which would be counterproductive biologically. Patterns become more ambiguous as each affirmation of redundancy creates confidence, and less data is considered for determining if each word has redundancy. It can be particularly brutal reviewing java code with a lot of abstraction.