ning/atlas — pull request #3 by darthjoel (2012-04-18 01:23:53+00:00)
Title: Added casts to make Eclipse compiler happy

The Eclipse compiler and the Mac JDK 1.6 compiler disagree on whether you can return List if your method's return type is List. The Eclipse compiler wants you to cast List to List and it is probably wrong in forcing you to do so. Is it a good idea to add unnecessary casts to your code to make a specific IDE happy? Certainly not from a purist standpoint, but it is a pragmatic choice:
1. Eclipse has a huge market share which is why I use it (clients made me do it) and I think the idea of OSS is to get a large community involved so broad IDE compatibility is desired.
2. The rules for bounded wildcards in Java generics are thorny at best so who knows maybe Eclipse is right or at least not wrong.
3. Three extra casts in one class in an entire project doesn't seem too bad a compromise.