An exploration of an alternative inheritance setup for collections in Java.
Java's Collection interface is a mess of optional exceptions and operations. It is an extremely poor software
contract; it is not specific or binding. It is not reliable — you can't call add() and expect it to work unless
you know, at compile time, the exact runtime type of the Collection.
One of the main issues stems from treating immutability as something that can be bolted on after the fact. In truth, write operations (mutations) should be built on top of read operations, not the other way around.
Container and its derivatives are an example of what Collection and its derivatives could have been with a focus on
consistent and dependable contracts.
Note that the concrete implementations are for example only, and are not necessarily performant.