Brothers! This discussion has great potential for being Flame-bait...

Tread lightly on the rice paper, Grasshopper...

Personally, I use both Java & PERL.

There's much that is Right & Wrong with both of them. But what drew me to both of them to the exclusion of everything else, was portatility, a.k.a. The Holy Grail of programming. That & Open Standards. Now I realize that Java isn't a "True" Open Standard. But I think that Sun, to SOME extent has been smart to keep control, seeing as how M$ has been hell-bent on squashing it.

It's terribly easy to write platform dependant programs, in either language.

So now we get into the pro's & cons... Superficially, the ones that beat you over the head with their obvious nature are Regular Expressions in PERL & GUI in Java. Now there is the nearly ubiquitous OROmatcher library to perform a wide range of Regular Expressions, using Java and there is PerlTk. But what's better is better, period. Then you can pick & pick & pick about execution speeds (which depend more on your platform than anything) & OOP purism, and also the simple number of lines of code required to do ANYTHING... How important it is to you & your career & the company you work form, that you "own" your source code...bla bla bla yadda yadda yadda

I beg of you my Brothers, embrace both. Though, IMHO I'd rather suck fish lips than go anywhere near VB.. 8-P