As soon as you start using reflection in Java, you're doing non-statically-typed programming. Since a lot of popular Java frameworks use reflection implicitly -

As soon as you start using reflection in Java, you're doing non-statically-typed programming. Since a lot of popular Java frameworks use reflection implicitly - such as Spring, Hibernate, etc - that includes a lot of Java code that's out there. And also, even if you carefully put a layer of explicit typechecking between the reflection based code, and the statically typed stuff, you're still throwing out the Java generics typechecking since none of that exists at runtime, and so your ArrayList<String> can mysteriously contain non-String types when you finally access it.