I have friends who have about the same amount of experience as me, but program in Java, earn more money and, (most importantly) have more career options open. I have a good job, but when it comes time to move on, will there be a Perl position waiting for me? My friends know for sure there'll be Java positions.

So what you're suggesting is that the only difference between you and your friends is the language you use, and your salary?

First of all, money isn't everything at a job. There's also the reward for a job well done, the fun you get out of working with a bunch of really bright people, the chance to learn new technologies, a nice workplace and maybe a pleasant commute.

Another problem is that Perl is kind of a dead end in terms of moving to other languages. One of my Java programming friends was initially a Smalltalk developer, but was easily able to move languages. I'm not sure an employer would be as convinced about a Perl developer doing the same thing (I'm not saying it's not possible, or even difficult, but it's what a potential employer thinks that matters). You can't move from Perl to .NET, VB, or really even C.

I moved from C, to awk, to Perl .. yes, there were some new things I had to learn, but I was able to get started fairly quickly. Am I still learning? You bet I am -- just today I made the connection betweem ?: and "Don't include this group in the collection of numbered results in the s command'.

But as a C programmer I knew about $foo = (condition) ? bar : baz; already, so that construct didn't throw me off.

Perl is actually an amalgam of C, shell, awk, sed, and (I'm told) some LISP as well. There may be other bits in there as well. Thus, moving from Perl to C would be fairly simple.

And don't concern yourself too much about what your employer thinks .. sometimes (gasp) they're actually *wrong*.

If you knew a recent graduate, who knew a little Perl and a little Java, which career path would you suggest they take?

Continue to learn both. Why do you feel you need to specialize? I have experience with C (15 years), various flavours of assembler (several years), and Perl (5-6 years). I also know databases (dBase III, ingres, MySQL and PostreSQL), and a fair bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And I continue to learn new stuff all the time. In this business, you have to continue to learn all the time.

Don't have a preconceived idea of what tool you want to use or what path you want to follow -- be more flexible and accept challenges as they come to you -- just remember, you have to keep learning, reading books, staying up to date on what's happening in the industry. Never stop learning.