If you don't know much about Perl (and I rather suspect that the person you were chatting with didn't), then the Java portability claim is an easy one to pull out. A fair number of Java proponents take portability as gospel, and try to use it as a generic trump card.

One reason that X might "bring home the bread" when compared with Y is that there are more jobs requiring X skills in some area than there are jobs requiring Y skills. This may have little to do directly with the relative merits of X vs. Y. Or it might.

Looking around Silicon Valley and points north, I see a lot of server-side Java development going on. But I think this is more a statement about how deeply people fear and detest C++ than it is a statement about Perl. A lot of C people moved to Java as a way to avoid having to endure the torture of C++. I have plenty of friends who looked around at disasterous C++ projects around them, and saw Java as a lifeline that would save their careers. Java offered the possibility of getting things done without spending their life fighting the language and debugging.

So why not Perl? For one, Perl wasn't as well known. When it was known, it was thought of as a scripting language, not a "real" (chuckle) language. And Perl didn't have Sun's marketing engine behind it. The timing of the world moving to browsers, with Java applet engines embedded, fueled a move to Java. And by the time people saw that applets weren't going to live up to the hype, server-side environments had begun to mature. There are now several good server side "application engines" for Java that manage persistence for you. And since a lot of applications this days need to sit on the server and generate pages based on stuff in a database, that's enough to generate demand for people skilled in Java.

So yeah, the hordes are moving towards Java. But, fortunately, that isn't where all of the money is.