You should buy your bosses a copy of Bruce Tate's Beyond Java. Tate is a well-know figure in the Java community and the main premise of his book is that Java has become over-complex and unwieldy and is no longer a good choice for most new development. A lot of the same points are made in this recent O'ReillyNet article.

Ok, so a lot of these people are talking about Ruby on Rails rather than Perl, but the good news is that they are finally seeing the benefits of dynamic languages.