I think the ideal is something close to ML-style polymorphism a la OCaml/Haskell, or F# on .Net.
The generics in C#/Vb.Net are pretty nice too, but their absence in the language during the design of the original standard libraries is still felt (typically along IDictionary and ICollection interfaces).
It seems obvious in retrospect how useful they are, but I do remember lots of contemporaneous "debate" about how academic and complicating they would be that turned out to be. My personal opinion is that these debates were relics of the C++ contingent of the ecosystem, and less applicable to languages running on top of virtual machines.
The generics in C#/Vb.Net are pretty nice too, but their absence in the language during the design of the original standard libraries is still felt (typically along IDictionary and ICollection interfaces).
It seems obvious in retrospect how useful they are, but I do remember lots of contemporaneous "debate" about how academic and complicating they would be that turned out to be. My personal opinion is that these debates were relics of the C++ contingent of the ecosystem, and less applicable to languages running on top of virtual machines.