> despite decades of working solutions Which "working" solutions? Has anyone solved creating a type system that offers OO/inheritance, generics, mutability and

> despite decades of working solutions Which "working" solutions? Has anyone solved creating a type system that offers OO/inheritance, generics, mutability and isn't mind-bogglingly complex? What is your definition for a "working" solution? I don't think any of the current languages we have fit this description, since all of them are capable of producing type errors that are way too complex to comprehend. > with a myriad of choices in tradeoffs Yeah, but how do you decide on which tradeoff to settle for? And why is the tradeoff to not engage in this mess not a just as valid one? > so you'll have to do the hard work of integrating a dozen different collections libraries and who knows how many different, after-the-fact, mediocre strategies to the generics issue, each slighly off, all of them conceptually incomplete somehow You're missing the point. Solving the generics issue for a specialized case, even if just on a library-level, is much easier and has much less impact on applications than solving the general case and forcing that solution onto every bit of code in that language. I don't think the author is advocating using a general purpose 3rd-party library for containers, but rather writing your own special-purpose ones for the few cases where the on-board tools aren't enough. > with the slight bugs that come from not having a well-trodden path Localized bugs are easier to solve than the type errors common to that "well-trodden path" you talk about, which may span an entire application. ..not that there is any consesus on what exactly that "well-trodden path" is, since as you mentioned there's a myriad of tradeoffs.