Not being a programmer by trade myself (SysAdmin), could you give some examples of the projects to watch out for (i.e. larger projects), and those where Perl is a better fit?

I have always wondered why there are so many Java jobs out there. I'd always chalked it up more to the hype of Java (which is probably still very true), but this really opened my eyes to the fact that the reason that Java is so sought-after may be exactly because it's great for larger projects with less skilled programmers.

Java seems like a pretty decent language to me, but again, I don't have experience with software projects. The fact that it always whined when I didn't catch an exception, while helpful, was enough to annoy me. My last question, I had actually been thinking about learning Java, what would you recommend as a language to learn that has potential to carry a resume, as Java would now, has business appeal, as Java does, but which doesn't assert "B&D", as Perl does not?