I give you a yes and a no. :)

From my experience with java, I never thought the words 'easy', or 'rapid'... :)

Easy? Oh yes. Doing things in java is indeed easy, and as the original poster pointed out, Sun has already written almost anything you need already, and it works on all platforms it is supposed to do. Compare that to the things on CPAN. :) Straightforward syntax, clean interfaces, logical structure, and everything an object. This is easy. You know what you have, and what it can do. Plus the docs for the java api are the best ones ever. Perldoc is close though.

Rapid? No, you are right. Java is in no way as rapid as perl. Perl is extremely rapid to work in, because it is a scripting language, you just write a few lines of code that says what you want done, and it has a functional interface, where lots of stuff is built in in function calls and even operators. Java is built around the foundation that everything is an object. That is all well and sound for some, but it doesn't make for rapidness when developing. On the other hand, you might win it back when it comes to maintenance and enhancements. Maybe.

So what do I mainly use? Perl. Always perl. Except when I need to do something complex, or socket/server stuff, or something multithreaded. Then I still turn to java. When those things work well and are easy to use in perl as well... what can I say? Perl is just so much more fun! :)

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