It would take longer for an experienced Java/C/C++ programmer to become an excellent Perl programmer than it would a college intern.

I disagree.

It's certainly not been true in my experiences of teaching newbie and experienced developers Perl. There's a hell of a lot of programming knowledge that's not related to the static/dynamic divide.

A Perl expert has a mindset that a static language developer simply cannot understand. Now, if you had said Lisp or Python or Ruby programer ...

There's a rather big assumption here that experienced static Java/C/C++ programmers are a completely different group from experienced Lisp/Python/Ruby programmers :-)