[scalaisneat]

I agree with this sentiment but view it inherently as a feature of languages like f# and Haskell - That small ripple at compile times makes trusting refractors easier. After having experienced this, languages like python become really challenging to grok without heavy unit testing.

[kibwen]

There's also a middle ground which is to support function-local type inference, but not inter-function type inference, which guarantees that such an "anchor" is never all that far away (especially never in another file). This is the approach Rust uses.