Generics

This morning I read a post about the .NET design guidelines and I am upset about the last line of this guideline. We are now going to have people choosing generics over polymorphism to solve a problem.  If I expect an ISession for the paramter of my method, class etc, why would that become a generic?  Maybe I am completely missing something here.  So I turn my chair around and start ranting to Peter and Brian to unleash my angry coder feelings.  It took a while for me to understand that generics are not templates and now I understand the need for typesafe containers so I can get T back from a method of class Foo<T>.  I just don't understand the need to put the responsibility of limiting T on the class.  If I want a generic sort algorithm, that should be outside of the container ala STL. Of course I also keep thinking when we get iterators in C# that we are getting C++ iterators and again, sadly, I am disappointed, so I understand the need, I just don't agree with the solution.

I understand that generics are not templates, but why not?  I think Stan Lippman's post hits in on the head.

So to get back to the real point of this post, using descriptive names for template paramters seems to support something that should be purged from the system, which are large classes, methods etc.  I belive in naming variables for what they are, but if you have a template and you can't see the name of the template parameter anymore, you probably have a method that is too long, or need unusually large fonts for accesiblity reasons. Objects are cheap and the methods in them should be short.  I am in favor of a bunch of small classes with specific responsiblities and small methods.

Don't get me wrong, I like C# and the direction it is heading, yet as a wise man Brian Button says "All languages tend toward C++".  And I tend to agree with him. I think the guys on the C++ 2.0 team are going to get it right and make some big waves in the world.  If you are interested in these types of things read here.

All that being said, this is my personal opinion and in no way implies the opinion of Microsoft.