Blech, this is one of the worst advocacy notes I've ever read. It's full of hype, and no substance. It's just taking cheap, unfounded, shots at Java, while in the mean time glorifying Perl (and its users), but doing so without any backing up. You sound like someone who is forced to program in Java, but doesn't have the guts to switch jobs.

Consider Java's Creation: It was invented to kill Windows.

Could you please provide reference that gives this statement any shred of credibility? Do you really think James Goosling created a language to kill an operating system? That doesn't make any sense.

Remembering when Java first came out, it was advertised as being 'easier to use', losing many of those 'nasty features' that confounded so many programmers, Pointers, malloc/free, system calls, etc. My response to that was "So we had to invent a simpler language because our CS grads are too stupid to use the ones that we have(C,C++, Fortran, perl4/5 etc)

Yeah, just like Perl loses many of the same 'nasty features'. Of course, it was invented because people were too stupid to learn C and shell coding.

One of the first things I fell in love with with Perl is that there are syntaxes in perl that can accomplish things with one line of code, typically involving combinations of 'map', 'grep' and slices, that take tens of lines with C/C++ OR Java.

Being able to jot it down in one line instead of ten doesn't always mean the language is better. If that would be true, we'd all be using APL (or one of its decendents). After all, we'd need tens of lines of Perl to do the same as you can do with one line of APL.

By contrast, I would say that Sun's marketting of Java ammounted to at best, "Use this if you hate Windows," and at worst, "Use this, or else".

SUN has a large presence on the Web. Could you provide us with some pointers showing this kind of marketing?

Ever meet a hard core Perl programmer who didn't know anything more than Perl?

Yep. On Perlmonks, on Perl mongers mailinglists, on 'comp.lang.perl.misc', and on other Perl forums, I often see people who think they are hard core Perl programmers, but all they know is a little bit of Web programming, and just a subset of Perl.

Ever meet a Java programmer who knew anything more than Java, and many times not even that much?

I know many people who program in Java I'm not worth standing in the shadow of their programming/computer knowledge. I know far, far more people programming in Perl than in Java. But from the set of people that know a lot more about programming/computers than I do, more program in Java and/or C than in Perl.

Perl was created and adopted because it was good.

Perl survived because it satisfied the needs for enough people.

Java has been rammed down our throats.

If the programming community has sense enough to let Perl survive because it's good enough, it has sense enough to kill off Java if it wasn't good enough. But Java is a big language, far, far bigger than Perl. And while SUNs marketing might have helped, they didn't put a gun to anyone's head to use it.

I seldomly use Java, but it's a decent language. And for many programmers (including many that now use Perl), Java is a far more suitable language than Perl is. Perl requires a twisted mindset, much less than Java.

Abigail