[sgift]

To allow backward compatibility Java introduced Generics with type erasure, which in short means they only exist at compile-time, not at runtime (there are some hacks around that, which various devs have used with great success to still get the information). That is another reason to just start with Generics from the beginning if you design a new language, so you won't have compatibility problems when you introduce them. It's not like Generics were a controversial feature when Go came out.

C#, which is often cited as an example for "generics done right" chose another path, which allowed generics at runtime - they made a hard break and just threw backward compatibility out of the window iirc. The reason Javas designers didn't do that is not only introduced generics far later in its lifecycle, but Java also has always followed the hard rule that breaking backward compatibility is something which should only ever used as a last resort and never between two versions directly following each other.

[layer8]

IIRC Arthur Van Hoff, one of the original Java developers, actually advocated for the inclusion of generics in the initial version, but it was dropped due to time constraints. It’s one of those features that a statically types language will always regret to not include from the beginning.

[neonsunset]

The "threw backward compatibility out of the window" happened in .NETFW 2.0, in 2005 (it did not, non-generic code that targets the pre-2.0 spec would work even today, the SDK is dead long ago but copied verbatim it would just run).