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My typing speed is not the bottleneck for me either, but the double bookkeeping certainly is. It takes me from "problem solver" to "code writer", a context switch I gladly live without. Type inference helps with that.



I'll second that. Similar problem reading code. All that cruft reduces the signal to noise ratio. Most of the time when I'm reading code I don't care what the types are, just what it does at a high level. Without type inference, step one is always scan the code and screen out all the boilerplate to get at the actual logic. When a lot of the code is boilerplate I end up spending half my mental capacity just remembering the bits that actually do stuff. If it's really bad I'll even rewrite it in pseudocode in a comment. Interestingly, in swift my actual code and that pseudocode are almost identical. By contrast, obj-c, which some people claim is very readable because it is so verbose and Englishy, I find to be fairly unreadable. There's just so much noise that I'm parsing out and and ignoring like 80% of it. Even in swift some people still manage to write C style code that's half intermediate types and variable names which just obscure the functionality.




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