This really depends on the situation: imagine something as classic as a birthday selector, what would you use for a year selection? The only applicable alternative is a slider control, but such a slider with a 100+ values might be very hard to use with the needed precision. Another common example would be a list of countries (or any long list of words actually), you can't use a slider there, it would be very counter-intuitive, and all other alternative controls would take too much space.