> I remember my first attempts at programming and being annoyed that I can't add a string and an int; ever since that little bit of housekeeping of using types made sense to me and I can clearly see how it eliminates entire classes of errors.

Type inference doesn't make these errors go away.

And about your other point, it's unfair to look at just a simple case of writing "string" or not as the only thing inference provides. Although I'd argue that leaving out types where possible helps readability-- it's really the more elaborate cases or intermediate steps during a longer transformation that inference helps with. Not to mention the fact that inference in closures is also really nice.