My two cents worth............

First of all, let me say that there are always people with their little 'view' of Perl. By this I mean that those who have embraced such languages as java and used Perl for only a few small tasks have no real appreciation for the power that Perl provides.

I work in a corporation of more than 80,000 employees, many of whom do programming at some level. You would probably be surprised that there is still a biased view against Perl here given that many of our critical systems include programs written in Perl. Many still think that Perl is still a 'glue' language that wouldn't be used for any serious applications. Others think of it as simply a CGI language.

My personal view is that Perl can do anything that Java can (and even better in many cases) except create a web applet. Even then, Perl can write, compile, and execute the java applet. I use Perl for most tasks because it allows me to create programs more easily and faster than with the other languages.

oh - and java is no more portable than Perl.

Mick