I nearly fell off my chair when I read this, from a developer who just heard the FLOSS talk with Avi Bryant:

As I wended my way home last night, I was listening to this "week's" FLOSS Weekly and just about had to pull my car to the side of the road, due to my sheer astonishment. Leo and Randal had a developer on who was promoting Seaside, a web development framework for Smalltalk (particularly the Squeak implementation). Smalltalk. Perhaps only you other CompSci folks out there will get just how insane a proposition developing for the web in Smalltalk truly is. No RDBMs. Everything's an object, even, say, the number "5".

Start with the sheer ignorance: sure, everything in Smalltalk is an object, but what does that have to do with RDBMS integration? Does the fact that there are primitive data types in a language like Java somehow make the Object/relational impedance issue disappear? I think not, which is why there are so many mapping frameworks around - TopLink started in Smalltalk and now exists for Oracle, Hibernate is very popular - and we have plenty of them in Smalltalk as well, GLORP being a nicely cross dialect one (and in the process of being nicely integrated with our Seaside support).

Here's a thought: if you wnat to see Smalltalk talking to a database, try some of the screencasts I've done on that topic :)

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