I understand not having any fancy features in a "corporate programming language", but wouldn't language features aimed at reducing code duplication (like generics) help with maintainability?

I think the extra flexibility gained would be perceived as a negative. The ideal (from their perspective) is that there is only one way to do a particular thing, no matter how verbose it is. Google has recently been mostly Java (Guice, dependency injection everywhere), and has long preferred incredibly verbose code at the cost of occasional duplication.

Agreed, it's likely what you say is the perception. But the thing is:

> The ideal (from their perspective) is that there is only one way to do a particular thing

The lack of useful tools like generics (and others) means there is no single way to do a particular thing: things must be duplicated everywhere (or ugly workarounds to avoid doing so must be employed, like casting from Object or using interface{} or whatever). Surely the benefits of better tools outweigh their inconveniences, even in a corporate environment? This is not a nerdy programmer's whim, but a major software engineering principle of direct consequences for any business.

Taken to an absurd extreme, you can simply copy & paste code everywhere -- that's the simplest programming model there is, and even the most junior of programmers can handle it without having their learning skills taxed in any way. It just leads to maintenance hell, which is why it's frowned upon even in corporate environments.