> Java's language philosophy is simple - everything must be an object. Except primitive types like long in this case, which are not objects. This was a perform

> Java's language philosophy is simple - everything must be an object. Except primitive types like long in this case, which are not objects. This was a performance-consistency tradeoff made in the early 90s. It made sense at the time and now doesn't make sense to some people, but that's ok. I wouldn't say Java sucks because of that either. Now type erasure, that's a different topic.