> This feels to me more like a failure of imagination than a technical impossibility. It's not the lack of possible solutions, but more of a design philosophy.

> This feels to me more like a failure of imagination than a technical impossibility. It's not the lack of possible solutions, but more of a design philosophy. > is materially hindered by the inability to express things like "List<MyDataType>.class See Guava's TypeToken https://google.github.io/guava/releases/25.0-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/reflect/TypeToken.html https://google.github.io/guava/releases/25.0-jre/api/docs/co... > I find that I spend an inordinate amount of time writing, maintaining and code reviewing all the extra glue code that needs to be written to handle tasks that other languages make almost effortless. Which is why the Java ecosystem offers a nice selection of languages to match almost everyone's taste. Many people like Java and feel productive using it, and those who don't can enjoy the great polyglot interop afforded by, among other things, generic type erasure.