Comment by Supermancho

> Modern IDEs will show you the type of anything at all times. I do not understand your point unless you're doing raw text editing of Java source.

The word "String" "Integer" et al. + "var" is too much real estate for being explicit. Sometimes, I'm looking at the decompiled source from some library that doesn't have a source package available.

> Those keystrokes are not just saved on writing, they make the whole code more legible and easier to mentally parse.

This is incorrect. Repeating it doesn't make it true. For trivial code (<10 lines) probably seems fine at the time. Lots of bad practices start with laziness.

Changing practice because an author thinks a function is small enough when it was written, is a recipe for unclean code with no clear guidelines on what to use or expect. Maybe they rather put the onus on a future reader; this is also bad practice.