[matt_wulfeck]

Probably because people are intelligent enough not to compare speeds inside of a vacuum. When someone denigrates a language as "java-like" they're really just comparing it anecdotally to the sum of all Java projects they've worked with. Rarely is the project a single-purpose, optimized pet-project.

[stcredzero]

Smalltalk was long castigated for being a "slow, poky interpreted language" long, long after it stopped being that in fact. In all of my time as a consultant for the language vendor, never did I ever come across the VM actually being too slow. In something like 90% of the cases, it was due to IO.

Before I left the Smalltalk part of my career behind, someone had the occasion to compare the parser-compiler of one Smalltalk which was implemented in C with Yacc/Lex with one implemented in pure Smalltalk with a JIT VM. IT turns out, once the console logging was disabled, the JIT VM's parser was just as fast as the one in C.

In my experience of almost 2 decades, it has been a constant that uninformed programmers are especially uninformed about the relative performance of managed languages.

[igouy]

If only someone was interested in contributing Smalltalk programs written with MatriX to use quad-core --

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/smalltalk.html