Chip & Pin has never been about minimising fraud - it's about pushing the responsibility from the banks onto the customers. And they're doing the same thing with the ridiculous Verified By Visa programme which just trains people to fall for phishing scams.

(1) Type erasure in java generics makes writing reflective code a nightmare.

(4) Support for iterators in the language makes them a lot easier to write

(5) - in your example, a is still strongly typed, it's just that you don't have to tell the compiler what it is. The dotnet rules wouldn't let you have an overloaded function such as callThisAmbiguousReturnTypeMethod that differ only in their return type, so this wouldn't be an issue.

It's also the only way to declare a variable with an anonymous type, e.g.

var x = new {Foo = "X", Bar = 0};

(and yes, Foo and Bar are also strongly typed)

Anonymous types can only be used within the method in which they defined, and are very useful at cutting down on the profusion of crappy little data type class that you'd otherwise end up having to write every time you need a simple tuple. Personally, I use them a lot for projections over LINQ expressions.

Oh, and don't forget c# lambda expressions which can be easily be decomposed into the equivalent expression tree.