The 30-Year Gap in the Collections API Java’s Collections Framework has a fundamental inconsistency: there is no uniform way to access the first or last element of an ordered collection. Before Java 21: // List — index-based var list = List.of("a", "b", "c"); String first = list.get(0); // first element String last = list.get(list.size() - 1); // last element — verbose, error-prone // Deque — special methods Deque<String> deque = new ArrayDeque<>(List.