The problem with the word "generics" is that it already meant something else in programming language theory. If I used reflection to implement a serialisation f

The problem with the word "generics" is that it already meant something else in programming language theory. If I used reflection to implement a serialisation function in Java or C#, it could be generic with respect to the data-type of the value passed in, but not parametric. A parametric polymorphic function strictly has the same behaviour for all types, a generic one has type-dependent behaviour. This matters of course when we want to reason about programs.