> the thing about them is that they work The extent to which you think strings need replacement is equal to the extent that you agree with this particular stat

> the thing about them is that they work The extent to which you think strings need replacement is equal to the extent that you agree with this particular statement. The charitable view is they let you get up and running without needing to work out every little detail yourself. The uncharitable view is that they appear to work far more often than they actually work. Because any invariants you may want them to have are ad-hoc, any error with those invariants can very easily slip by the programmer, the compiler, and the unit tests. Depending on what type of programmer you are, this can be The Father Of All Sins. Strings are low-level. They're a half-step above binary streams. And because they're ubiquitous and all libraries work in terms of strings, there's active pressure against creating new types that represent the invariants and structure that your application may actually need, which often results in those invariants never even being thought through in the first place. Again, it's subjective, and depends strongly on your opinion of Worse of Better. I agree that your thoughts on Inheritance. I think this problem is difficult to solve in a way that's not strictly worse than the original problem. I would be interested to see a language that only defines strings as a Protocol (or whatever) with a handful of implementations in the stdlib. I honestly have no idea if it would be the Garden of Eden or a steaming pile of ass, but I think it's important that we find out.