No comments on this?

On Tue, 09 Aug 2005 03:57:01 -0700, Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com> wrote:

> 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?
>