[XorNot]

Which still proves the parent's point: it's not necessary. The question is what absolutely can't be done without them (probably nothing) so a better question is how much design/engineering/test time could be saved with them?

On the latter part I'm fairly cynical these days, since I'm presently on a team where the lead embraced a Scala-DSL heavy, functional design and the net result has been a total loss of project velocity because when we need to prototype a new requirement, the push back has been paraphrasing "oh, could you not do that in <core product> and handle it somewhere else?" - so we end up with a bunch of shell scripts cobbled together to do so.

[kccqzy]

> what absolutely can't be done without them

Of course nothing can't be done without them. With or without generics or inheritance the language is still Turing complete.