Yeah, those 60% extra characters do bother me. And the uneven indentation.

I know some/most people don't care. I can't be one of them.

Maybe we'll get `val` in ES9.

Is there really much of a difference between "const" and "con"? I get that one is 66% longer than the other, but does it actually affect the readability of the code or the amount of time it takes to write it?

Going way back to ancient Lisps `let` has been the const declaration in a lot of programming languages. It's too bad ES2015 decided to use `let` for `var`/`val`, because `let` should have been const.

That said, I've come to terms with const, even if I find I accidentally use let sometimes from time spent in Lisp and F#.

In C++ I always do, everything is 'const auto &' if it can be. C# const is different, it's more like C++ '#define'.

Why wouldn't you always go for the most immuatable declaration? Even in C++, where you can have 'const int f(const int y) const;' it's still worth using even though you have to type it a few times.