Primitives in Generics

[Jesse Kuhnert]

And quite frankly, this whole mailing list feels a little bit like one
of the elves trying to bestow the secrets of the ring before leaving
middle earth and getting questions like "but why do you live in trees?
That's kind of wierd."

The rest of the elves (bracha, Steele, gosling, etc) are already there
in various forms. It's kind of insulting to see so many people unable
to accept a genuine desire (and knowledge/experience to back it up) to
better the language with their own false sense of their own idea of
what is right - even if that rightness is mostly about supporting an
idea that has long since lost any coherent basis as a real actual good
thing in computer science / humane design terms but is mostly there
for self ego. ( which is also human but far from the generous spirit
of accepting when you are wrong)

On Friday, July 9, 2010, Jesse Kuhnert <jkuhnert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is that really what they'd ask? Maybe they would, as they happily
> moved forward with all their newfound productivity and application
> performance boosts.
>
> With the current proposal however I think the questions may be a bit
> broader and more extreme. Only in cases where they've discovered
> modern (or more popular now) programming concepts though - which will
> be almost everyone except for those poor souls who really do fit the
> java developer stereotype and maybe don't like programming all that
> much anyway. No matter how it's packaged.
>
>> Regardless, the point is that once you make it work for generics in
>> general, it also applies to SAM types under the current proposal - and
>> the utility of such a solution would be far greater. On the other
>> hand, enabling primitives for function types while leaving the same
>> limitations for generics would definitely lead to the question of "why
>> did they solve that problem for the new thing, but didn't also fix it
>> for the old one?".
>>
>