> Although it's far from certain, after over a decade of work it looks like a design for parametric polymorphism, what is colloquially but misleadingly called generics...

What exactly is misleading about generics?

The psychology of thought leaders is fascinating. The term generics is colloquially understood to mean parametric polymorphism and here's Pike redefining the term to draw some distinction that doesn't really exist just to remain self-consistent.

Come to think of it, this is a really common pattern. If you've made remarks that you must now backtrack then refine terms until your old writing doesn't seem to contradict your current stance because you can just say people were using the terms wrong and you were right.

Some results for searching "generics": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g..., https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/generics.html, https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/Generics.htm..., https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/generics.html. If you search for "Wadler generics" then a book about generics in Java is the first result: https://www.amazon.com/Java-Generics-Collections-Development....