[moomin]

C# developer here: my own take is that there are times when vat makes code harder to read, but your team should value identifying and avoiding that. In any event, it’s still perfectly possible to elude type information using techniques such as never declaring a variable in the first place. From this perspective it’s just one more tool in the armoury for writing readable code.

In its favour: It’s surprising how much code doesn’t really need the types written out to be readable (a discovery that will shock Python developers not at all). Furthermore, refactoring said code has less busywork in it.

As a side note: There’s one weird benefit of var not mentioned in this. Namely, you’re guaranteed there’s not going to be a cast. This is a serious problem in C++ where assigning the result of a function to a variable can have arbitrary side effects. (It’s not that bad in Java since pretty much all you can do is cast to interface.)