Pim Elshoff has a new post to his blog that shares his preference on typing (keystrokes, not variables) in applications (hint: he likes it):

We sometimes conceive of ideas that are arduous to express in code. Like persisting data, or some other uncommon task (sarcasm). It's not difficult, but it takes a lot of keystrokes to write. Being problem solvers, we find it difficult doing this kind of manual labour, especially when machines can do it for us. Still, I would like to take this opportunity to say that typing rocks and solutions that save typing suck.

He talks about the abstraction that frameworks provide (less typing, more work) and and some of the "magic" that comes with them. He gives specific examples of some of his pervious experience with frameworks (including some pains with Symfony2) and how some of the magic he's seen is easy to write but hard to read.