It still comes up quite often.  Autoboxing and type erasure are two of the biggest mistakes that have been inflicted upon the Java language after its original release.  Not knowing about them will lead to a world of hurt.<p>They should have killed the primitive&#x2F;object distinction, turning the primitives into stack-allocated objects and rewritten the collections libraries.  But no, syntactic sugar is better than actually fixing the problem for those that want a fix.