looks who's around :)

> Is that a true issue. Never heard of that

No it's not a "true" issue. It's one of those things like "use two registers rather than one" or "why do you use a long, an int should be enough".
In practice it's impossible to measure if a long is faster than an int (at least without isolating it from the rest of the application).
What I mean is that for ease of reading in a specific funtion, it's useful to me to _know_ that we're dealing with a LinkedList rather than a different kind of List. I would not take advantage of it if it where to be place on an API (even internal one), but for simple private fields or like in this case local and short lived instances I consider it more convenient to use the explicit form.

It just happens to also avoid importing an interface which I would otherwise not need, feels clean inside.