I thought this Sun internal memo was one of the funniest things I'd read in a long time (even if it's probably not true). The 9MB 'Hello World' ranks right up there with '640K ought to be enough for anyone'. Seriously, I think the best part was this bit:

"A study performed by an outside team appears to indicate a rough parity in performance between Java and a common implementation of another OO language called Python (see IEEE Computing, October 2000, "An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages" by Lutz Prechelt of the University of Karlsruhe)."