On: Java 21 VirtualThreads vs. Clojure Lazy Seqs

[vips7L]

You haven't had to declare the type since Java 10.

   var myThing = new MyThing();

[matsemann → vips7L]

Yup, hence "used to", but I could be clearer it's no longer an issue.

[vips7L → matsemann]

My issue with your statement is that you're pretending that this was a recent issue. This hasn't been an issue in over half a decade. Do we point out bugs in libraries from 6 years ago? Are we critical about what other languages looked like then? In my experience, Java is the only one that gets this criticism.

[riku_iki → vips7L]

still need it for class members, unlike in some other languages.

[kaba0 → riku_iki]

Most languages don’t do type inference in “signatures” (function, but also class/struct members), as it would give you negligible benefit, a huge cost for the compiler and is commonly thought of as a bad practice.

Out of Scala, Rust, I believe even Kotlin, none do inference in these places. Even Haskell, which does infer function signatures as well, need explicit type annotation for `data` definitions.

[riku_iki → kaba0]

typescript does such inference.

I disagree with you about huge cost for the compiler and benefits are the same as in normal code block: reducing boilerplate.

[kaba0 → riku_iki]

Typescript’s type system is deliberately not sound though.

In general, there is no type inference available for OOP type-hierarchies as opposed to a more Haskell-like type system, where Hindley-Milner works

[riku_iki → kaba0]

I don't have strong knowledge in types theory, but why

class C { a: int = 0; }

can't be replaced with

class C { a = 0; }

? what issues it brings?..

[kaba0 → riku_iki]

That can. But what about a field that is not initialized there?

[riku_iki → kaba0]

obviously you would need to provide type.