Java Generics and Collections, 2nd Edition

Afterword

This book began life when Phil Wadler returned to Scotland from America in 2003 to take up a chair at Edinburgh University. At that time, the Generic Java proposal (Bracha et al. 1998), which had been struggling for acceptance in the Java Community Process for five years, had finally been slated for inclusion in Java 5. Phil was one of the authors of Generic Java, and I had some experience with functional programming, so a collaborative book project on this major upcoming feature seemed like an obvious opportunity. As it turned out, I couldn’t match Phil’s deep background in type theory, so he suggested that a complement to the relatively theoretical treatment of generics should be a part on its most significant practical application, in the Java Collections Framework. This wasn’t one of my specialisms, and my initial efforts were poor, to say the least. I am forever indebted to Josh Bloch, who wrote an extraordinarily generous and detailed review of a late draft, correcting every minor error and transforming the quality of the material.

Returning to the book nearly 20 years later has been an interesting experience. Before starting work, I was apprehensive that I might find that neither generics nor collections had changed enough to justify a new edition: after all, Java is famous for its backward compatibility, so surely the material should have been timeless? Of course, once I engaged with it in detail, I was surprised that I could have been so naïve: after all, isn’t ...