A brutally candid reply. Okay, I am sticking with Perl because I like the community, but I should not expect that it will keep me profitably employed on other people's projects.

And just because I am programming Perl for a living now doesn't mean these jobs will always be around.

So if I need to learn network programming, and we all need to learn it, then I can learn it using Perl if I like. However, I will probably need to learn Java also to really apply network programming skills for corporate and government clients.

On the other hand maybe Perl will surprise us all, and Java will slip. One thing I believe is that Perl is truly open source, and Java is not. And no one knows what is going to happen, and whether Sun's fairly tight control of Java compilers will backfire on it.