[erik_seaberg]

> feels late to make such a big change

This is recoverable. The Java world was also saddled with a decade of awful pre-generic code, but we burned almost all of it to the ground and started over.

[int_19h]

The need to tackle generics later resulted in design decisions such as type erasure, which even today are still limiting the evolution of Java.

[erik_seaberg]

Yeah, that was an unforced error. Fundamental changes to a language can and should rely on upgrading deployed runtime libraries.