I needed to use C# for some project. Used generics without actually being aware what they were. Helps that C# implements generics without type erasure.
> Helps that C# implements generics without type erasure.
For about 95% of "using generics" that makes no difference, and you'd have had no more issue in Java.
That aside, Go is implementing reified generics (there is no real backwards compatibility concern as the "core" collections are already ad-hoc parametric types, and the rest is not a great loss).
Java had a lot more legacy code using a much higher number of standard but not-generic-at-all collections, I'd bet there were also concerns around the forward compatibility of legacy reflection code, and they'd probably considered a lot of collections-related goodwill spent with Java 1.2's Collections Framework and the deprecation of the limited set of original collections.
