I like the 80’s band Erasure, but not when it shows up in Java Generics.
I know that there is a battle:
backwards compatibility vs. no damn casts + give me info via the bytecode + I don’t want someone to sneak in via other means to do what they want
For some reason backwards compatibility seems to always win with Java.
I know it is important, but sometimes you want to move on and evolve. I think we have reached that point, and Sun should move to Java 3 SE/EE/ME (or maybe Java 5000 or something!).
The aim of backwards compatibility isn’t even working unless you are under certain conditions.
Come on. Let’s free the Sun engineers from their “hmm, but how can we keep backwards compatibility” jail. Let them fly. Let them evole the language for the next level. Please!
Large companies have to go through insane testing before they go from jdk 1.3 to 1.4 to 1.5 (or probably more are just on 1.3). So, let them deal with it (or choose to stay at 1.3 for legacy, and Java 5000 for new projects :)
