Reading Aseem Rastogi, Avik Chaudhuri, and Basil Hosmer‘s POPL 2012 paper The Ins and Outs of Gradual Type Inference, I ran across a quote that could well appear directly in my POPL 2015 paper, Space-Efficient Manifest Contracts:

The key insight is that … we must recursively deconstruct higher-order types down to their first-order parts, solve for those …, and then reconstruct the higher-order parts … . [Emphasis theirs]

Now, they’re deconstructing “flows” in their type inference and I’m deconstructing types themselves. They have to be careful about what’s known in the program and what isn’t, and I have to be careful about blame labels. But in both cases, a proper treatment of errors creates some asymmetries. And in both cases, the solution is to break everything down to the first-order checks, reconstructing a higher-order solution afterwards.

The “make it all first order” approach contrasts with subtyping approaches (like in Well Typed Programs Can’t Be Blamed and Threesomes, with and without blame). I think it’s worth pointing out that as we begin to consider blame, contract composition operators look less and less like meet operations and more like… something entirely different. Should contracts with blame inhabit some kind of skew lattice? Something else?

I highly recommend the Rastogi et al. paper, with one note: when they say kind, I think they mean “type shape” or “type skeleton”—not “kind” in the sense of classifying types and type constructors. Edited to add: also, how often does a type inference paper include a performance evaluation? Just delightful!