On: Why we picked Java

[silvestrov]

refactor tools for Java is just so much better than what you can do in a plain text editor or if the language does not have type annotations.

[garethrowlands → silvestrov]

It's the (static) types, not the type annotations that matters in IDEs these days. Even in Java there are (very limited) situations where you can omit the type and the compiler infers it. And the ide handles it just fine. And in, say, Scala, which has more inference, the ide works fine (albeit not as well as Java but that's more down to maturity).