John.Maloney at disney.com wrote:
	Anyone who's interested in simulations, especially simulations of
	biological systems, will find Mitchel's book:
	
	  Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams:
	    Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
	    (MIT Press, 1994)
	
	fascinating reading. After reading it, I just couldn't keep myself
	from implementing the core ideas in Squeak. I'd say the performance
	of the Java version says a lot about what's wrong with Java. The Mac
	version of StarLogo was written in Lisp, I believe, and it's quite fast.
	
Let me second that.  StarLogo is fun, and it's plenty fast enough, but
the ideas in the book are even better.