I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "developer convenience" - it seems that to maximize developer convenience, it's best to write plugins in an interp

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "developer convenience" - it seems that to maximize developer convenience, it's best to write plugins in an interpreted language like JavaScript (or as might be more appropriate for the time/place he's talking about, VB6). As far as performance, the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it - sure, interprocess communications have overhead, but at least Word doesn't crash because someone else wrote bad code ;) This seems really obvious once you get your head out of the technology - for a computer user, the crashing of a word processor is probably pretty high on the "worst things that can happen" list. A plugin not working fast enough is really, really low.