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"For me personally, I don’t know any better. I have never used generics and I haven’t found a situation where I strongly require it." Sounds an awful lot like

• pron 12y ago
  No, because language features aren't a la carte, and when you pick a language can only weigh the combined pros and cons of each package deal. In fact, in many cases where the "Blub Paradox" card is played, that's actually what's happening: one language might be "linguistically" more powerful but another has better performance, or better monitoring, or a larger variety of available libraries, or even a specific library that you absolutely need. It is true that some languages can theoretically be categorically better than others (or, at least for certain domains), but in practice that usually applies to the compiler (i.e. the language itself) alone, and rarely to the entire ecosystem. Also, I find that people tend to vastly exaggerate the impact a specific language feature has over total productivity.
• Retra 12y ago
  I've found that generics are really only 'necessary' for building libraries. If you are writing applications or utilities, then you probably don't need it very much.
  • emsy 12y ago
    Generics aren't necessary at all, but they are a powerful addition to the means of expression a language offers and have use cases beyond collections. So while it's not a deal breaker, it's definitely sad and hard to understand why they left them out. Especially when you know Java's history and the pain they went through when they finally added generics.
    • Retra 12y ago
      Yeah, true. I feel disappointed whenever anybody tries to tack generics onto an existing language. You can never really tell if it is done correctly or not.