Since you're mostly porting from ksh, can you find a mostly shell-ish example that ports nicely and readably into Perl, then port it into Java as well. It's good to be able to say "We have a fair amount of code like this, and look how similar it looks in Perl. It just has some of the anoyances cleaned up. The Java for this looks pretty awkward." It has to be representative of a fair amount of code, but it doesn't have to be representative of all the code for your point to be important. People care about the parts Perl will make nicer, and the parts Java will make nicer. You want to do a good job of presenting the Perl side, for your body of code. The things Perl takes from shell scripting should help a lot. A good example is powerful in guiding thinking.