>And it is a feature that 99.9 % of the time does what you want While typing a v...

danbruc · on March 26, 2016

That is why you have the choice to be explicit. You choose between shorter and less redundant code and full control over the type of the variable. What is the point of typing out the same type in a single line twice?

  HashMap<String, AtomicReference<Foo>> fooMap = new HashMap<String, AtomicReference<Foo>>();

What is the disadvantage of using var?

  var fooMap = new HashMap<String, AtomicReference<Foo>>();

It's less redundant, easier to read, does not clutter the code and has exactly the same information content. And if you really want the variable to be of type Map<,> nobody stops you.

whitenoice · on March 27, 2016

I don't think you have to type it twice even now, if you specify the type on the left, you can just specify <> on the right. So you can write something like - Map<String, List<Xyz>> foo = new TreeMap<>(); This has been present from Java 7. The reason I like this is that when you are parsing through some library code you can just look at the variable declaration and ignore its initialization to figure out what type it is.