I take your point on consolidating staff - although there is room to argue over a beer about whether a good coder is good because of general skills or specific language skills.

With There's nothing you can do in Java that can't be done in perl I wanted to make the point that it cuts both ways and so can't be used as an argument per se.

Again I accept your speed arguments, and without particulars of the situation it is difficult to get specific. I could argue that 2 programmer years is more expensive that faster hardware, but that is mud slinging and also applies equally to Java.