I was griping about Java's lack of unsigned types for over 20 years until it dawned on me why mixing signed and unsigned types together in the same language is

I was griping about Java's lack of unsigned types for over 20 years until it dawned on me why mixing signed and unsigned types together in the same language is a bad idea. Consider when one method returns an unsigned type, but another one accepts a signed type. Signed and unsigned types cannot be safely casted to each other without loss of information, and that causes bigger issues. The only times the lack of unsigned types causes issues is when doing low-level binary encoding, and most programmers steer clear of that anyhow. I think it's a good tradeoff to make things simpler for most, but a bit more difficult for few.