Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> wrote:
	According to the MIT folks [StarSqueak] is significantly 
	faster than their JAVA version of StarLogo (we are not sure why, 
	since no big attempts were made to optimize StarSqueak).

Possibly because Java is not a terribly well compiled language yet.
I have *interpreted* Scheme (using Aubrey Jaffer's SCM) running faster
than Java 1.2 (*with* Sun's JIT enabled).  Different algorithms, no doubt,
but the overall task running faster in interpreted Scheme than compiled
Java surely says _something_ about Java.