Have you used Alice? If you have used ALiCE, please tell what do you think about this programming enviroment.?

I am doing a research paper in the Ph.D program at Kean University. I am doing a survey to see who like alice and who dont. I want to compare ALICE with JAVA. Please answer the questions from your own experiences.Have you used Alice? If you have used ALiCE, please tell what do you think about this programming enviroment.?
We used Alice in our high school APCS class this year. I didn't really like it that much. It seemed to me that it's sole purpose was to attract people to CS who would otherwise not have an interest in it. The environment didn't feel like real Java style object-oriented programming either. It was just selecting a series of pre-made functions for the pre-made characters to execute. However, I will admit that it was pretty fun; I just don't see it having any practical value in real programming (maybe I'm wrong, we didn't really do an in-depth study of it).