Why do some claim that Java's implementation of generics is bad?

Question

I\'ve occasionally heard that with generics, Java didn\'t get it right. (nearest reference, here)

Pardon my inexperience, but what would have made them better?

Answer 1

Another side effect of them being compile-time and not run time is that you can't call the constructor of the generic type. So you can't use them to implement a generic factory...

   public class MyClass {
     public T getStuff() {
       return new T();
     }
    }

--jeffk++