How is it that new Julia programmers tend to abuse type annotations?

[stevengj]

@lrnv

Is there a reason for this common mistake ? Maybe other languages have different behavior that people wrongly transpose to Julia ?

I think that it’s mostly a habit from other languages — they are taught that type declarations = static typing = fast, and untyped variables = dynamic typing = slow. Automated type inference and specialization are more exotic concepts (if they are available at all) in many popular languages, whereas in Julia they are central.