What is the point of explicit typing again?

I’m noticing that C# 3.0 has implicit type declarations which is actually a very interesting step to make this language look less like a cheap Java clone. It is a very neat feature that lets you declare your variables like this:

var s = "Hello";
var d = 1.0;
var numbers = new int[] {1, 2, 3};
var orders = new Dictionary();

By show of hands, lets see who doesn’t approve of this feature? Who here thinks that we should explicitly declare the type on the right side of an assignment statement? Yeah, you guys are all wrong. Please tell me, why is it necessary to write:

String foo = "bar";

Could foo possibly be anything else than a String in this line? String can’t be subclassed, and no other data type can be instantiated this way. So the word String doesn’t tell me anything that I wouldn’t know by looking at the line anyway. It also doesn’t tell anything new to the compiler which can infer the type quite well. Forcing people to type String every single time they declare one is just cosmetic… no, pedantic anal retentiveness. Hell, even Scala folks use implicit type declarations – and these are the people who think that static typing in Java is not static and not type safe enough.

The explicit declarations are quickly becoming a thing of the past. The trend is moving towards less verbose, compact and more elegant syntax – in both dynamic and static typing camps. C# seems to be adopting to this new reality.

When I first saw C#, I described it to a colleague as “a Java Clone written by C++ people, or a C++ clone written by Java people”. It seemed to have been created combine the best of both worlds and draw both Java and C++ developers in. But that was a long time ago. Java is no longer the cool and hip language. It is “your dad’s language” – outdated, bloated dinosaur. It’s not going to go away but it is no longer cool. I think Microsoft made a smart move here, distancing itself from it. I mean, implicit data types, lambda statements and all that jazz.. They might actually have a chance to remain relevant as Java is slowly transitioning into it’s new life as a senior citizen of programming languages. Actually, scratch that – relevant is a wrong word here. Change it to popular, well liked or buzz worthy.

Both C# and Java will remain relevant for years to come, just like C is still relevant now. No one thinks C is revolutionary, hip, cool and awesome anymore. But no one seems to be eager to throw it away and forget about it either. Universities still teach it, and companies still hire C programmers. The same fate awaits Java and C#. They will be around for a long, long time.

[tags]c#, c++, java, implicit type declaration, scala, typing, programming[/tags]