We live in a post-generics world, recently, October 30th, 2008, J2SE 1.4.2 retires has reach its End Of Service Life.

I think it's a coincidence but Maurizio Cimadamore decide to introduce a long requested feature in javac, it now emit a warning for all usages of raw types (a parameterized type without '<>').

And frankly, we (all Java developers) seem not ready for that. To take an example, just after putback that change into jdk workspace, the Xlint:rawtypes was disable by default when the JDK is compiled (bug 6753718) because it generates too many warnings.
Only JMX Team takes time to browse its workspace and remove all raw types see bug 6763639.

Though we was warned by the JLS (4.8)

  The use of raw types is allowed only as a concession
  to compatibility of legacy code.
  The use of raw types in code written after the introduction of genericity
  into the Java programming language is strongly discouraged.
  It is possible that future versions of the Java programming language
  will disallow the use of raw types
 

we are not ready :(

So why should we remove those warnings. To prepare the future. Lot of people whine (and i'm one of those) because generics are not reify at runtime. But generics can't be reified until you're code contains raw types. So to prepare the future, please fix all these raw type warnings in your code.

Cheers,
Rémi