Are you aware of how little standardization in coding actually exists in J2EE? When I was writing Java code at a recent job, I had to work on some other people's code that was just horrendous. The Sun coding guidelines really just scratch the surface, and most people don't even follow those unless you make them. Things like exception handling, use of recent language additions, choice of libraries, etc. make it fairly difficult for Java programmers to just share code without lots of talking and agreement on standards. Perl certainly allows a much wider range (e.g. beginners can write ugly code with globals and no warnings), but within a group of experienced coders with good style and agreed standards it is no harder to share Perl code than it is to share Java.