[Animats]

True, C++ and Go don't have a real type inference engine. They just compute the result type of an expression and use that to create the type of a variable in an assignment. However, this handles enough of the common cases to be quite useful.

(When you have a real type inference engine, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it did, or why it didn't do something.)

[catnaroek]

Nobody forces you to use type inference. If you think a particular piece of code is too tricky to understand without explicit type annotations, by all means use explicit type signatures.

That being said, I have never encountered a program that was hard to understand because types were inferred rather than explicitly annotated. I use explicit type annotations in two situations:

(0) As a compile-time analogue of printf debugging. Not exactly a joyous thing.

(1) At module boundaries, to control what modules expose to each other.