To be fair, Java's generics are so awfully implemented that I stay away from them as much as I can - i.e. invariant, with use-site variance notations by means o

To be fair, Java's generics are so awfully implemented that I stay away from them as much as I can - i.e. invariant, with use-site variance notations by means of existential types and freaking wildcards (instead of declaration-site like how Scala does it, which is much saner). I mean, take a look at this presentation: http://parleys.com/play/514892250364bc17fc56bb15/chapter0/about http://parleys.com/play/514892250364bc17fc56bb15/chapter0/ab... And I'm not even ranting about the generics being based on type-erasure, like so many other people are doing. Type-erasure is actually one of the best features of Java, since reification implies doing damage in the runtime which would have impacted other languages and with a good type system, you wouldn't need reification anyway.