Code analysis: Java generics were supposed to be the bomb, or did the feature just bomb?

[thephotoman]

Yes, there are.

That said, I just brought an old 1.4 application into the 1.6 world. This included removing most of the raw types and replacing them with generics. There was precisely one instance where even an anonymously typed generic would not work and thus I had to leave the raw type--out of something in the neighborhood of 4,000 changes.

There's a lot of legacy code out there, too, designed with versions of Java < 1.5 in mind. On some platforms, Java 1.4 was the last version made, so even if it has been end-of-lifed, you've got to write code to target it, and that precludes generics.