I spent the last three years on the receiving end of mass quantities of code written by people who knew what they were writing but didn't do an adequate job of communicate it to readers who didn't already know everything.

What you say is true. And it works, if you're the author and are having trouble keeping it all straight. It doesn't work if the author didn't do it and you are the reader, though.

And that's the more common case, for two reasons. First, code is read more often than it's written. Second, when you're the author, you probably already have it in your head how many parameters foobinade takes when you call it, but when you're the reader, you have to go consult the definition to find out.

But if I was willing to do it, I could go through and annotate the variables like that, and have the compiler tell me everything I got wrong. It would be tedious, but I could do it.