How are people still defending type erasure? Sure, it was “defensible” in the sense that there were reasons the choice was made. But it was clearly a bad choice

How are people still defending type erasure? Sure, it was “defensible” in the sense that there were reasons the choice was made. But it was clearly a bad choice (to many people at least) when it was made and the effects are still rippling through the ecosystem. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s even more clear that the naysayers were correct and the harm to the Java ecosystem from type erasure is worse than the harm from creating parallel libraries would have been. If sane generics had been introduced, the non-generic collection types would be a historical oddity by now and we wouldn’t be talking about how a future enhancement is going to undo the erasure decision.