Yea, it works, in the sense that the bulk of world finance "worked" running on COBOL for 30 years.
And look how poorly that worked out. People assume software will break all the time, because most of the software they are exposed to does exactly that. It is 2014. There is no excuse for using languages lacking important features from 1973.
And your assertion is that using Generics would lead to code breaking less often?