"Programmers of elegant scripting languages desire similarly elegant looking code with flexible data structures even where no flexibility is in play. Some who know better will understand that technical limitations make the difference between hashes and other types of named lookups essentially nil for many popular language runtimes."
OK, if no flexibility is in play in many usages of hashmaps, should not an intelligent interpreter/compiler be able to detect this and modify the use of the hashmap accordingly? Maybe even use a different lookup system in those cases? It seems like that would be ... elegant.
The reason VMs don't need to be slow is that you don't need to treat an eval call literally, you don't always need to create a full environment to parse a twenty character string, right? But if you can get around that, should you not be able to get around hash-map's problems? Am I missing something.