Chris,

Quite a love affair this is.

List<?> someList = something.getList();
If you make that into List<? extends Object> then you could use
contains(new Object()) on it, I think, with my amazingly dumb API.  I
haven't tested this.  I don't use ? for anything myself.

Regarding sanity, someone famous once said something along the lines of
"wars start because everyone believes everyone else is a little bit
insane".  Point taken though, I should be a little more careful with my
choice of words.  It wasn't meant as an insult to any person or
organisation.

As a 'full' user of generics, as far as I know, I don't need the ?
notation, so the use case of wanting to look for an arbitrary object in
a List<?> doesn't arise for me.  I don't know when you might want a
List<?>, so given that exception, maybe I made a mistake.

A possibility without doing a lot to existing code would be something
like:

final class CollectionUtility
{
  public static <T> boolean contains(T object,List<T> list)
  {
     return list.contains(object);
  }
}

I also implemented read-only interfaces, e.g., ListView, MapView, and
used it partially to eliminate bugs and partially as an experiment into
how I would go about implementing collections from scratch myself.
That, I think, gave me a better understanding of generics, and a better
understanding of the existing implementations.  I think both of these
goals are fine.

My new interfaces might not be useful with the ? notation, but I don't
need them to be.  That's ok.  I haven't published them, only the idea
of them, and even if I did, it would not be a bad thing.  The original
poster, for example, might try out my interfaces, or just read about
them, with the comment that they won't work well for
List<?>.contains(Object), and decide against using them.  That's fine,
it's good, the OP would have been educated.

I firmly believe it's better to try new ideas than to unknowingly stick
with old ideas.

I did not say ANYTHING against Joshua Bloch.  Kindly try not to put
words in my mouth.  I knew he had something to do with the development
of Java's enums; I didn't have a clue he was involved in generics too.

That's just one of the advantages of a public forum, isn't it.  I can
suggest something, you can shoot it down, hopefully with good arguments
that make the OP able to make an informed decision.  I could have
emailed him privately with a jar file full of these interfaces, but I
didn't.  You'll kindly note that I didn't force my ideas on the OP.  I
told him what I did, and what he could do if he wanted to follow the
same route.  Again, my language could have been better.  I'm fairly new
to newsgroups.

Cheers.