If you have a chance to learn another programming language, you should do so. Aside from the obvious benefits to a resume, it will teach you different ways of looking at things. One job, for example, I had to learn VBScript. This language is so crippled in its ability to handle many things that Perl programmers takes for granted that I was forced to find "creative" solutions to problems. Many of those creative solutions, to be honest, involved reimplementing Perl functions in VBScript, but it does give one an appreciation for what one has.

What will you learn from Java? You will learn to hate arrays that cannot be resized. You will kill for a printf function or something equivalent. You will scream at the stupidities inherent in int and Int. You will marvel at how your Swing application can sit there and crash without anyone doing anything. You will hate using 20 lines of code when you know you could do it in five (and sanely!) in Perl.

What will you love about Java? Just a guess, but I think you might appreciate a much cleaner OO model. Having a clear distinction between classes and instances of them can be nice. Distributing code to others and knowing that they have to take exception handling into account is great. Never again will you see open FOO, "foo.txt";. While people may scream at me for this, Java applets can be a lot of fun to program (well, the results are fun, the programming is not).

To be perfectly fair, I didn't study Java for very long. But in the short time that I studied it, I found that it really didn't fit the way I like to program. It has many nice features that I want in Perl, and will get in Perl 6, but I'm willing to deal with Perl's kludges. On the other hand, it can be difficult to appreciate Perl's problems without working in other languages.

Cheers,
Ovid

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