Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tel 4083 days ago
What is it that makes Java style generics valuable to you? Many other languages have, ah, generic generics.
1 comments

There's a common misconception that erased generics are wrong. It's just that, a misconception: erased generics are just a bad fit for introspectable and runtime-heavy languages like Java. The GHC Haskell implementation also uses erased generics.
Can anyone read Angelica Langers FAQ with all the strange limitations and corner cases, and still call it good design?

I can understand it as a compromise for migration compatibility. I disagree with the goals of JSR14 - and history has shown that the concerns that lead to the migration compatibility constraint was non-issue.

Taken as an isolated type system where you want orthogonality and principle of least surprise (among others) it is not good design. And in that sense, yes, it is wrong

> Can anyone read Angelica Langers FAQ with all the strange limitations and corner cases, and still call it good design?

Again, you're confusing erased generics and erased generics applied to java.

I'd understood this subthread to be spawned from someone saying they love "Java-style generics". Focus on Java therefore seems appropriate, although I think we're still waiting for G*P to let us know what aspects they were actuallly referring to...