[praptak]

Go (without generics) is not Java 1.4.

Go's built-in collections are actually generic and Java's generic-less awkwardness was mostly about collections.

[anothernewdude]

I know, right? In Java 1.4 you cast to Object, in Go you cast to interface{}. Totally different.

[praptak]

Most of the casting in Java 1.4 was from collections of Object. In Go the collections are typed, so the casting is confined to some very specialized pieces of code.

[simiones]

The only difference between Go and Java 1.4 in terms of collections is that Go has a generic map type, which Java didn't. Java 1.4 still had generic arrays, just like Go. In fact, it was a little easier to program with generic arrays in Java vs Go (but also less safe) because in Java a subtype[] can be passed to a function which takes a supertype[] (arrays are covariant).

[pjmlp]

Yeah, right because we never been there before.

    class IntList {
       private List objList;

    public add(int elem) {
       objList.add(Integer.of(elem));
    }

   }

Rest is left as exercise for the readers that never used Java generics, or C++ templates.