My company made a surprising announcement last Friday. Basically the CIO said in a IT meeting that the company has decided to once and for good remove Perl from all IT projects - past or current. All Perl guys on the team will join the Java team immediately as junior programmers on the Java team, and help them to rewrite the applications.

What reasons did they give for this change? The reason I'm asking is that any change of this magnitude must have been undertaken with the foreknowledge that a) it's a serious chunk of work (time, money, resources) and b) it's going to take some time to get it right.

The signal is clear that the company does not recginize the Perl skill people gained over years.

Possibly -- or it could be that some higher up got caught up by a Java evangelist and has decided to throw away some years of working Perl code in favour of a new solution in Java. It would have made more sense if they'd announced that new development would be done in Java and any Perl projects would be phased out in favour of Java rewrites.

I do remember (during the Internet boom) working on a web site that generated hundreds of graphs a second using mod-perl and gnuplot, running on a pretty plan piece of hardware, while our competitor was running a Java application on some humongous piece of Sun hardware and getting ten graphs per second. Sometimes you just can't beat Perl's performance.

However I often see people talk about the negative side of Perl on this site and elsewhere, and to be frank things do not seem to be very bright for Perl... which left me wondering...

You're going to hear good and bad about just about every piece of technology .. get used to it. For me, the bottom line about Perl is, a) can I quickly develop (and maintain) code, b) is it stable, c) is it extensible and flexible and d) is there community support. Yes, yes, yes and yes.

So I'm not sure how Java is a better choice on any technical grounds .. however, there may well be political or religious angles that we cannot infer from your posting.

By all means learn Java .. it's never a mistake to learn something new while your employer's paying for it .. and in the meantime, keep your eyes open for any other opportunities out there. Who knows, you may end up loving Java .. it's possible, isn't it?