> If sending extra messages makes something x-times slower no one should 
> pay such a price "happily". Nothing is gained if something is flexible 
> but hardly anyone - read: roughly one or two orders of magnitude fewer 
> than potentially possible - uses it because of its slowness.

I agree but you're ignoring the fact that todays machines are *fast* and 
therefore the price is offset by the relative improvements in hardware 
speed, VM technology etc. Nobody would be running Squeak 3.8 on a 66MHz 
machine, I'll grant you that, and if our audience would use such 
machines we'd have an order of magnitude users less than we do. But even 
in schools today, we see *giga* hertz machines :-)

That's not to say we should throw away speed but the patterns really 
have changed. For example, we use "foo isNil" without even realizing 
that doing that is some 30 times slower than the equivalent "foo == nil".

Cheers,
   - A dreas