There is a one more issue -- the easier it is to manipulate strings in some language the greater chance that they will be used as an internal data structure for

There is a one more issue -- the easier it is to manipulate strings in some language the greater chance that they will be used as an internal data structure for things that certainly aren't texts. And this almost always causes substantial performance loss and awful bugs that are either untraceable due to a dependence on subtle configuration details or form security holes. Or both.