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Asked: 2026-05-10T14:43:18+00:00

I liked the discussion at Differences in Generics , and was wondering whether there

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I liked the discussion at Differences in Generics, and was wondering whether there were any languages that used this feature particularly well.

I really dislike Java’s List<? extends Foo> for a List of things that are Liskov-substitutable for Foo. Why can’t List<Foo> cover that?

And honestly, Comparable<? super Bar>?

I also can’t remember for the life of my why you should never return an Array of generics:

public T[] getAll<T>() { ... }

I never liked templates in C++, but that was mostly because none of the compilers could ever spit out a remotely meaningful error message for them. One time I actually did a make realclean && make 17 times to get something to compile; I never did figure out why the 17th time was the charm.

So, who actually likes using generics in their pet language?

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  1. Haskell implements type-constructor parameterisation (generics, or parametric polymorphism) quite well. So does Scala (although it needs a bit of hand-holding sometimes).

    Both of these languages have higher-kinded types (a.k.a. abstract type constructors, or type-constructor polymorphism, or higher-order polymorphism).

    See here: Generics of a Higher Kind

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