The main problem is not that Perl suffers from this or that. Their main concern is about finding a future job where they can see Java everythere in jobs announces, and no Perl at all.

Java enjoys this buzzword status because Sun Microsystems puts marketing effort into making it so. Perl is probably more widely used than Java, but less effort goes into marketing Perl. (In fact, about the only marketing Perl gets (aside from word of mouth) is from O'Reilly, and their main goal is to sell books.)

Your coworkers will find that in future jobs, they will use Perl, even if it isn't listed on the job description. The real-world experience in Perl will be useful in the real world -- quite possibly more useful than the equivalent experience in Java, from a practical perspective. It is not for nothing that Perl has been called "a language for getting your work done" and "the duct tape of the internet" and "practical", among other things.

If you're looking to beef up your resume and get Java listed on there, one way is to get some kind of paper certification. Doesn't Sun offer something of that sort? If they don't, I'm sure someone else does. While you're at it, pick up a Microsoft .Net certification too. (Even better would be a computer science degree, but that takes longer and costs more. Go for the certifications.) Certification in Java plus three years job experiece developing a large web application will look just as good on a resume as three years developing a Java application, I would think.

As far as what technology is right for the company to use, I would think that the important things would be how well it works, how easy it is to maintain, and how easy it is to find and hire people who can work on it. Perl seems like a pretty good choice. I don't think your company should change its core technology just to improve employee resumes. If they want to offer some resume-building stuff for employees as a benefit, how about sending people to seminars and stuff? A lot of companies do that. Some even pay for certification courses. Your job experience will still show up on the resume as job experience, even if the details of the type of work aren't *exactly* the same as the job you're applying for.

As far as serious, well-known applications that are written in Perl, Bugzilla and SpamAssasin seem obvious, but I'm frankly not sure how that's relevant to the rest of your post.

As far as Perl not seeming "sexy" to the young people these days, that's partly because Perl5 is relatively old tech. A lot of us don't *remember* Perl 4. When Perl6 comes out, expect some renewed excitement.

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