Unlike Java, which costs $$lots to get trained and certified before anyone will take you seriously . . .

Sorry, can't agree with that. I've done some Free Software programming in Java, and if there was any reason why I wasn't fully accepted by the other project members, it was because of my tendency to have tons of ideas that were left unfinished, not any particular lack of certs.

Admittedly, I've never been paid for a single line of Java code, but have been paid for most of my Perl code (including a few CPAN releases).