I think any discussion on Perl Vs Java would be lacking without some historical perspective on both.

Consider Perl's Creation: Perl was the creation of one visionary. Who did little more than come up with a language to make his own life, and those of others easier.

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

Ease of Use?

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). I hear the refrain already, "by that logic you would say that you use C++ because you're too stupid to undertand assembler!" I defend my observation by saying that C offers an easier abstraction of operations than does assembler. In contrast, I don't see Java being able to abstract things that much better than C++.

But I digress

I would offer that in some respects Perl can be harder to use than Java. Darn Straight. It's also much harder to use a full featured CAD/CAM(Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacture) workstation than it is to use a paper and pencil. But the results are often worth the investment in effort.

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.

Adoption

Perl was marketted to the community at large with not much more than, "use this, see if you like it."

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".

Continuing Legacy

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

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

In The End

Any given language has its advantages and disadvantages. However, I think where we fall off the track is when we start to say things like "this is the LAST language you'll need." Computer languages have come and gone, but Java was the first language that I saw that dared to come out and say, "this will render all others obsolete." Well if that were true they wouldn't have to come out and say it. It would just happen on its own.

Perl was created and adopted because it was good. Java has been rammed down our throats.

In reply to Hype Vs Substance (Yet Another Perl Versus Java Node) by ptkdb

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