Each tool has its merits, even if it only serves as a bad example :-)

I think that if you learn more different languages, you have more tools available to you to tackle the problems you'll encounter. One major point I find in Java programming is the pattern-orientedness of the algorithms / classes implemented in Java; my experience with Java is, that people there tend to document which Programming Pattern they applied to solve a certain problem, be it the Visitor pattern (an object iterates over a collection of other objects, and "visits" each element) or the Observer pattern (an object registers itself with another object and is then notified of changes within that other object). It's easy to implement these patterns elsewhere, but Java people seem (to me at least) to be more educated about patterns.

I see that you are already good at comparing Java with Perl and at finding the Perl way and Java way to express what you want to accomplish. This is what speaking languages is really about, expressing the same thing in different ways, only that Java is more roundabout in IO tasks than Perl.

To show you a small thing which is easy in Java but hard in Perl, have a look at threads. Java (and the underlying JVM) has threading built in, together with semaphors (called "monitors" AFAIR). This makes threads ubiquituous in Java, while they are virtually non-existent in Perl.