Yeah, and Java is referred to as "3-4 times slower than C++", which makes me think it's probably from the late 90s or early 00s.
That said, most of the arguments for Java around improved speed might apply to any language that runs on the JVM, though someone else might want to chime in here (I'm a little out of my depth trying to talk about how Lisp, Ruby, etc are implemented on the JVM).
Unfortunately the JVM is optimized for Java, rather than for computer languages in general. This is a problem because you can't just say execute function 'foo' on object bar, you have to look up the type of bar to find foo and then execute it.
Clojure gets around this by having all its functions implement a standard interface, and Java 7 has sorta seen the light (still no closures, but they can kind be emulated).
