Gosling's outburst is continuing to demonstrate an "out of ammunition" posture at Sun. I spotted this retort to Gosling tonight:

Here’s a good measure of performance. A certain sorting algorithm that determines the most active conversations. 100ms in Java, but a painfully slow 500ms in Ruby (5x). Once you add database query and networking, the difference between the languages is about 10%. 10% is not a big difference.

About the size of it. Compared to dynamic languages, Java is a huge pile of premature optimization.