You don't need reified generics with a more powerful type system. You might be feeling that C# .NET is better than Java, but it's actually a symptom that C#'s t

You don't need reified generics with a more powerful type system. You might be feeling that C# .NET is better than Java, but it's actually a symptom that C#'s type-system also sucks. Basically whenever you have to do an `instanceof` check, that's a sign that the type system isn't strong enough and hence needs to be solved at runtime. One such thing missing from .NET for example are higher-kinded types. Basically people end up with the need for `instanceOf` because they aren't able to write generic code that abstracts over containers such as List[T]. And this holds back language development on top of .NET actually. There are good reasons for why alternative languages flourished on top of the JVM and not on top of .NET, in spite of its original marketing, which is a little ironic. Not the only reason mind you, other reasons where availability on Linux, having an easier time to generate bytecode along with debugging symbols, more mature tooling, etc, but having reified generics in the runtime either means that you have to limit your language (e.g. C#'s type-system with a different syntax), or it means that you have to do the type erasure yourself and always have performance problems and be considered a second class citizen. Lack of higher-kinded types is actually what's holding F# back as an FP language, because in FP there is a lot of opportunity to abstract over M[T] types, that are just not doable in a static language without HKT. And don't get me wrong, I like dynamic typing as well, but the problem with languages like Java and C# are that they are neither here, nor there, in many ways being the worst of both worlds. And the only advantage that .NET's reified generics have over Java is actually the specialization it is doing for primitives. Which is nice for performance reasons, since you avoid boxing and so on, but doing specialization doesn't necessarily need to be a runtime feature, when it can very well be a feature of the language's compiler. And we weren't talking about performance anyway.