Tim Bray doesn't like the "it just works" argument:

“The poor boy, that primitive Java stuff broke because he doesn’t have auto-magical big numbers like Lisp-n-Smalltalk had back in the day.” Thank you for raising my consciousness. If you’ll grant that the trade-off between fixed-size hard-wired datatypes and more abstract ones has been under discussion since Turing was a tot, I’ll grant that many attempts to pack the data in tight are symptoms of premature optimization. But space-vs-time trade-offs are just not gonna go away; deal with it. And I’ve had my working set blown to hell more than once trying to build the parse tree for what seemed like a moderately-sized incoming message, in a language that turned out to be just a little too high level. And the “My thought-experiment language solved that in 1976” mantra is boring .

Here's another one for him: Try doing the factorial of 1000 with Java integers. Whoops - can't do that either. It's not that the space vs. time is going completely away, but: in a world where we have 1GB+ of memory available, and hundreds of GB of disk, it's an affectation to hold onto 32 bit integers as some kind of rational optimization. Face it, Tim - Smalltalk and Lisp got this one right a long, long time ago, and James Gosling still hasn't wrapped his head around it.