The disclaimer is that I wrote Java at a Fortune 500 company colloquially known by two initials before I discovered Perl and struck out to find riches on my own.

I've worked with both. I have done much more with Perl than with Java.

A competent programmer will be able to code in either.

A competent Java programmer will be able to write cross platform code, if your idea of platform compatibility ranges from both Win32 to Solaris. Bill Joy himself help you if you want to write an applet. (This seems to be less popular with Sun's marketing department these days.)

The nice thing about Perl, when it comes to a portability standpoint, is that the people who write it make sure it work on other platforms. Even better, for those platforms on which it's too odious for us mere mortals to attempt to program, there are crazy people like Ilya and even companies like ActiveState and Indigo that make sure the main distribution compiles on exotic platforms like VMS and Windows.

With Java, if you're not Solaris or Win32, you're second class. (No offense towards either Blackdown or kaffe, who are doing fine work in a difficult situation.) Sun's not interested in portability that helps anyone but Sun.

Perl, of course, suffers no such market-dominating constraints.

Update: mothra is quite correct that Perl does favor Unixy systems... but at least there's an officially blessed binary available for just about any platform on which Perl runs, which is not the case with Java. (I danced around that point slightly.)

In reply to Re: Perl and Java by chromatic
in thread Perl and Java by Chady

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