Yeah, I miss the good and simple times when Java didn't have all this unnecessary bloat like generics and annotations. We generously peppered our code with cas

Yeah, I miss the good and simple times when Java didn't have all this unnecessary bloat like generics and annotations. We generously peppered our code with casts from Object and explicit boxing and unboxing, and it was good. Our code was so clean and readable, and we neatly wired everything together by configuring class names in XML. We were happy and life was good. </sarcasm> In all seriousness, Java's implementation of generics was less than ideal, but I recently had to deal with a lot of pre-Java 1.5 codebases that haven't seen much upgrade in recent years. It wasn't fun.