No language is a career path, IMHO. Things will come and go. A good developer can switch languages very quickly and becomes familar with the general themes (static vs dynamic languages, strong vs weak typing, garbage collection vs manual memory management, functional programming, OO programming, procedural programming) and can use that to his advantage.

I'd say if you like Perl more than Java, go with the Perl job as happiness is important. But learn other related dynamic languages, get familar with Java, and by all means learn C (and to a lesser extent C++). These things will serve you well even if you don't use them -- and having familarity now will allow you to quickly switch to new languages for new jobs.

I was at a primarily Java/C++ shop (shudder) and now I'm going to be doing Python/C. Given the choice, go with what feels good at the time.