Why is using a wild card with a Java import statement bad?

Question

It is much more convenient and cleaner to use a single statement like

import java.awt.*;

than to import a bunch of individual classes

Answer 1

It clutters your namespace, requiring you to fully specify any classnames that are ambiguous. The most common occurence of this is with:

import java.util.*;
import java.awt.*;

...
List blah; // Ambiguous, needs to be qualified.

It also helps make your dependencies concrete, as all of your dependencies are listed at the top of the file.