[OT] Java generics (was: Guido sees the light: PEP 8 updated)

[Tim Delaney]

On 17 April 2016 at 23:38, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:


> > Java generics ruined a perfectly good language. I mean:
>
> The diamond operator in JDK 7 makes this a lot more tolerable, IMO:
>
>     Map<AccountManager, List<Customer>> customersOfAccountManager =
>         new HashMap<>();
>

To some extent - you can't use the diamond operator when creating an
anonymous subclass, and you often need to explicitly specify the types for
generic methods. The inference engine is fairly limited.

I wouldn't say generics ruined Java - they made it better in some ways (for
a primarily statically-typed language) but worse in others (esp. that
they're implemented by erasure). I also wouldn't describe Java as a
"perfectly good language" - it is at best a compromise language that just
happened to be heavily promoted and accepted at the right time.

Python is *much* closer to my idea of a perfectly good language.

Tim Delaney