quick question, do you people (especially those working with IntelliJ): - always specify types explicitly, - never specify them when IntelliJ can infer them (since it will show them as hint text instead, at least with the IDE's default options) - something in-between? (like, only for interface/abstract/open methods' return types since they define a contract) i suppose it's mostly a matter of preference in some cases, but i find myself hesitating a bit when writing super simple/closed methods that return a boolean, or when using things such as

List#toMutableList()

(it seems a bit overkill to mark the resulting variable as a

MutableList

then), so i ended up going for the 3rd approach (aka, only for overridable stuff), but i was curious if there was some kind of consensus on this

It's indeed a matter of preferences. There are some cases where specifying the type explicitly is advisable : 1. Exposing the return type of a function as another type (for example, returning a

MutableList

as a

List

) 2. Interface implementations 3. Public functions in general (in order not to break code that use them when changing the implementation)

fair points, thanks!