While Java doesn't inherently suck too badly, at least no more than most other languages, I stand by my statement--it would've been as much work to move from perl to Java as from perl to C, and his win would've been much less. Dunno about C++, as I find that when I write C++ code, the only difference for me between C and C++ is the comment style, so it's not like I'm taking advantage of the language... :)

The design of the JVM (not Java the language, mind, butt he JVM itself) puts some inherent limits on what can be done to run fast without extraordinary work, but this isn't really the place for that particular discussion.