Generics were a necessary thing, but the type erasure is a huge problem, and unfortunately one that can't be fixed without a completely new bytecode format. Als

Generics were a necessary thing, but the type erasure is a huge problem, and unfortunately one that can't be fixed without a completely new bytecode format. Also, annotations, while a necessary thing to bring it up to speed with modern practices (such as nullability contracts), add to the bureaucracy of Java and make it more painful to work in. Don't get me wrong; I do like Java, and have written hundreds of thousands of LOC in it over my career. But there's only so much it can do without breakage, and only so much that can be papered over and worked around. Even Kotlin suffers from the JVM it rests upon.