But if you have a awesome editor such as Eclipse when you are writing Java, Java becomes much, much easier and faster to code than perl. The editor looks up functions for you (and there documentation), compiles on the fly and tells you where errors are instantly. It saves tons of time.

And yet I still find myself being more productive with Lisp/Perl/Ruby and similar languages than I am with Java and IDEs like Eclipse or IntelliJ. Frankly the only thing I miss about Eclipse in the Perl world is decent refactoring support - which is a hard problem with Perl I freely admit.