One flaw of the article, that is indeed interesting, is that it seems to ask us to accept a fact that serves little purpose. Yeah, we understand why the designe

One flaw of the article, that is indeed interesting, is that it seems to ask us to accept a fact that serves little purpose. Yeah, we understand why the designers made the choice because it was the best for them, and they did think a bit of their users, but just a bit. Decades later, we're still wondering as we get to more and more complex use cases, why we're stuck with passing the class object to all our generic types just to know who we are. It's really a rare instance where Java gave an engineer's solution when they should have given us something more, like a compile flag, a fork, a GenericArrayList<Something> that would be reifed, anything, rather than excuses about ecosystem, backward compatibility perfection, etc. I understand why they took that decision, I don't understand how it helps all of us do meaningful generics :(