After having read through two of these long discussion threads -- and very interesting they are! -- I find that there is one aspect of the comparison that has hardly been touched on at all: the database interface capabilities of the two systems. Java can use only interact with JDBC, as far as I can gather, whereas Perl can interact with Sybase, Oracle, mySQL/SQL, and one or two other database systems, correct? Wouldn't that make Perl much more useful than Java?