If you declare myList
as ArrayList
, you fix its concrete type. Everyone using it will depend on this concrete type, and it is easy to (even inadvertently) call methods which are specific to ArrayList
. If sometime later you decide to change it to e.g. LinkedList
or CopyOnWriteArrayList
, you need to recompile – and possibly even change – client code. Programming for interfaces eliminates this risk.
Note that between Collection
and ArrayList
, there is another level of abstraction: the List
interface. Typically the usage pattern of a list is very different from that of a map, set or queue. So the type of collection you need for a job is usually decided early on, and is not going to change. Declaring your variable as a List
makes this decision clear, and gives its clients useful information regarding the contract this collection obeys. Collection
OTOH is usually not very useful for more than iterating through its elements.