Yes... but I think the real question that will stump people is "What is <? super Foo> and how is it different from <? extends Foo>". :D
Java generic semantics are wild and often surprising.
But too your point, I think typescript is FAR more complex than C++ yet I almost never see similar complaints of its complexity. The richer the type system, the more complex the language.
That's not the real confusing one in generics. The real confusing one is "What is the difference between Class<List> and Class<List<?>>" (i.e., mixed generics and raw types)... I only know about this because it bit me in the ass once!
Ha! I thought about doing a tricky thing with wildcards vs missing generics.
What gets even more wild is, for reasons I really don't understand, when a missing generic makes its way into a generic pipeline it seems to have the tendency to erase other generics. (IE, `list.stream().map((f)->new Map())` does weird things with the stream as it gets more complex.). You can throw in "What's the difference between List<Object>, List<?>, List, and List<? extends Object>" for good measure :D
These are both pretty intuitive - you can provide any class which is extended by or extends T respectively. Some of the consequences are less intuitive, but I don't think it's any hard to remember. As someone who last professionally programmed Java during Java 7 days, it was still clear to me what these mean.
Java generic semantics are wild and often surprising.
But too your point, I think typescript is FAR more complex than C++ yet I almost never see similar complaints of its complexity. The richer the type system, the more complex the language.