I would say that Ceylon is heavily guided by the constraints of wanting to always do The Right And Elegant Thing, and not unduly compromise on that in light of

I would say that Ceylon is heavily guided by the constraints of wanting to always do The Right And Elegant Thing, and not unduly compromise on that in light of the nature of the underlying VM. _Which_ VM doesn't quite enter into that question. We're not crazy about this; of course compromises are necessary; hell, we just added use-site variance to the language purely to make Java interop better. So to clarify: ceylon.language and ceylon.collection are designed the way they are because they're like way better and cleaner than java.lang and java.util. Not because they represent a "compromise" with JavaScript. Likewise, the main reason that Ceylon only has 3 numeric types (Integer,Float, and Byte) is because that seems to me the Right Thing from the point of view of the goals of the Ceylon type system. It just so happens that this is also the right thing if you want cross-platform execution. Hope that answers the question.