I want to say something about the security issue because Java supporters seem to bring it up a lot. Neither Java nor Perl programs have buffer overflow vulnerabilities, except when the main interpreter or a used library has one. The kind of security problems that show up are mistakes like not properly checking input that is used as part of a file name or using session IDs that can be guessed. These are problems with trusting client input too much, and both languages are equally vulnerable to them.

If a method needs to write to a file, you can't use Java's security model to prevent filesystem access. The security model that Java offers is mostly about sandboxing and running untrusted code, which has nothing to do with real server-side website exploits.