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Alan Green has some wild theories:

In a recent Charles post points out that it takes a lot of (keyboard) typing to iterate over a list in Java, compared to the same piece of functionality Ruby, Perl, Python, Lisp, Smalltalk, OGNL and Haskell.

It would only be a fair comparison is these languages were suitable for large systems development.

At the time Java was created, Ruby, Perl, Python, Lisp, Smalltalk, OGNL and Haskell were either non-existent or suffered serious deficits as large-systems programming languages - Back then, the in-vogue large-systems programming language was C++

Apparently, Alan Green is still in High School - he equates "in vogue" with "serious". So prior to 1995, Smalltalk wasn't suitable for large systems development? Oh, really? I worked for ParcPlace Systems back then, and between 1990 and 1995, lots of very large, very successful projects were done in Smalltalk - both in VW and VSE, and in the (then new) IBM Smalltalk. Many of those projects - at Fortune 100 firms - are still in production. It could be simpler than this - I suppose one could translate Alan's statement this way: "It's not fair to compare Java facilities to Smalltalk, because when Java came out I hadn't heard of Smalltalk"