I'm not sure how good their sampling is of the entire Java community. Being an O'Reilly site, they may inheirently attract some Perl people who happen to write some Java, too. Or even Java people who happen to write some Perl.

O'Reilly does a booming business in Java books. Just look at how many of them are out and how many are on the "coming soon" list. However, I would agree that there is probably a certain bias in readers of OnJava: pro Open Source sentiment. They are probably not reaching people who wouldn't touch Tomcat with a 10-foot pole.

That perception of bias is pretty accurate; I've long argued that ONJava should cover open source Java topics! Looking at the survey, I'm also impressed at the numbers of people deploying on Linux and the BSDs.

Java people? Perl people? Dammit Jim I'm a programmer. Java and Perl just happen to be in my toolkit.

There's no need to get defensive about it -- the article says nothing derogatory about Perl. I posted it because I thought it was interesting that Perl was a more popular choice than Python with that particular audience, and also that it was fairly widely used despite the public attacks that some Java fans make on Perl.

I thought it was interesting that Perl was a more popular choice than Python with that particular audience

I'd have thought that would be a slam dunk in almost any community (except Python programmers; obviously more of them would vote for Python (go figure)). Perl is, among Very High Level Languages, the market leader and the canonical example of the genre. The other languages in this category (Python, PHP, even Ruby) all compare themselves to Perl, strive to be better than Perl in one way or another, and so on. Among third-generation languages, C probably holds this spot, but among VHLLs it's Perl.

---

;$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$;[-1]->();print

The proccess to run Java code:

  SOURCE -> PARSER -> BYTECODE -> RUN (AT JVM)
[download]

  SOURCE -> PARSER -> BYTECODE -> RUN (AT Perl interpreter)
[download]

So, Parrot, our VM for Perl 6, has a similar process, but usual for many languages, and yes, it will be for scripting languages over a VM, and we will never call our Perl 6 code as a "compiled" code as the Java folks do. Well, unless we convert the parrot code to binary, what is a real compiled code! ;-P

The same reason people say that Java is portable: it's marketing.

Why is Java not a scripting language? Because scripting languages are usually very high level, fairly concise, and quick to get things done with. Java is a lot closer to that than C++, but it's miles from Perl, Python, etc. Nevertheless, the use of Java in the middle of JSP pages is often described as "scripting."