Comment by torginus

I think languages with strong support for IDE type hints as well as tooling that takes advantage of it are a fairly recent phenomenon, except for maybe Java and C# which I think are regarded by the wider hacker community as uncool.

C++/C IDE support is famously horrible owning to macros/templates. I think the expectation that you could fire up VS Code and get reliable typescript type hints has been a thing only for a decade or so - for most of modern history, a lot of people had to make do without.