You make a good point azatoth, but I believe .. as others have already commented on that that each language has it's uses/pros/cons. At the company where I am now, we primilary use Perl for parsing(tis excellent) and a bit of database programming. We're just starting to use weblogic with Java - jsp - for our new web application projects. I like you, just took a Java course - although this was a bit intense for 5 days (it was a sun certified course - oddly enough not one student was planning on taking the exam), it went through OOP and many of it's advantages, as well as Java and it's many uses. I won't discuss it here, it's not really the place - but I can definately appreciate perl's simpleness and ease of use after taking the course - although I liked the freedom that a developer is given with Java and it's event handling, interfaces, inner classes, etc. But, to reiterate - I think Perl is great because one doesn't have to go through such lengthy syntax to produce the same output as Java.