I agree with all of this. I remember way back when i was doing CORBA programming (argh!) thinking "can these stupid bastards not specify a simple string class??" To have the most commonly used data type be so complicated makes me think we have got things deeply wrong somewhere.
The Tower of Babylon story seems to tell the story of where we went wrong.
I’m only partially kidding, because I think this is a fundamental-and-ancient-issue of writing (information) technology. As soon as different groups went to encode their language, this problem was born.
