Has it ever been conceived to create an entire new API like how it was
done for Dates and Times? Obviously this would be a massive
undertaking, but it seems to me we've just about reached the limits of
how far we can stretch the current API.
"This code is a mess, we should throw it away and rewrite it"
-- every developer
Don't confuse the volume of "I would rather do it this way" replies with
the complexity of this issue; I think that's just the nature of the game
("Being the biggest crime of the last 50 years, and everybody wanted to
get in the newspaper story about it.") Stuart's proposal is a measured,
responsible, carefully-thought-through way to extend the framework we have.
In addition to "massive undertaking", and in addition to "if you think
you can't get people to agree on something the size of a golf ball, try
to get them to agree on something the size of Montana", there's another
massive problem here: migration. It's not just a matter of having a
"better" Collections library; the collection interfaces we have
(Collection, List, Map, Set) have found their way into the API of nearly
every Java library. Moving to Collections II would then force a
migration on every one of those libraries (or consumer of those libraries.)
