As a primarily .NET developer, I think I can count on two hands the number of times that I've needed to actually write my own generic types. Generic functions

As a primarily .NET developer, I think I can count on two hands the number of times that I've needed to actually write my own generic types. Generic functions are maybe slightly more common, but still pretty rare. However, if I had a penny for every time I've taken advantage of the generic collections built into the standard library, instead of using the old shitty, type-unsafe ArrayList or HashTable collections, I wouldn't have to work for the rest of my life. .Net generics are more limited than full C++ style templates, or maybe I've been lucky enough to never encounter any code where people have gone overboard with them, but that seems to be a pretty sweet spot.