Squeak primitives

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Tue Aug 9 10:57:01 UTC 2005


I was reading an old colleague's blog and came across this:
---
http://blogs.msdn.com/texblog/archive/2005/07/08/437002.aspx

This is a remarkably idealistic point of view -- ideal and also quite  
impractical.  What a truly beautiful world it would be when everything  
could be an object and developers were free to extend primitive types with  
impunity.  The problem is, this has been done in the past (e.g.,  
Smalltalk) and it has failed to achieve commercial success, largely  
because it's impossible (today, anyway) to make a language perform at a  
level acceptable for most applications without primitive strings, ints,  
bools, etc.
---

I was having two difficulties with it:

1. Isn't Smalltalk basically competitive with C#? Yeah, it's slower, but  
not as much slower as, say, VB has been over the years. And it's not  
nearly as slow as Python or Ruby, which are currently far more popular.

2. Doesn't Smalltalk have primitive strings, ints, bools, etc?



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