Generics are supremely useful for containers. They are kind of one trick ponies in that sense in application code. Similar to reflection, I’d say, which is utilized for serialization 99% of the time.

The thing is that one use case is so essential, so foundational, that we really can’t just skip it. You need generic containers, for ergonomics and performance. I mean, compare C qsort to C++ std::sort.

The languages that “get around” generics, like PHP, include god containers in the runtime. The language I’m designing is also that way, I’d like to avoid generics preferably forever.

But there’s a tradeoff there. God containers are very flexible, and we’ve seen the ramifications of untyped PHP arrays.