I came across this article from InfoQ today: "Original Sin" (Would Java be Better Off Without Primitives?). I've been very impressed and happy with Ruby's commitment to making everything an object. I had been indoctrinated into ignoring primitive-versus-pointer distinctions by Scheme and Haskell, so to revert to Fortran/C thinking when I picked Java up was kind of annoying. My question after reading the article was why I assumed that Java had to have primitive data types.
There are some cool tidbits about Java in that article that make it worth reading. I'll spoil the coolest one: Java exists because Sun couldn't license Smalltalk. What could have been!
