You could, of course, say the same things about "many Perl developers" -- people who just want to get a CGI script working without caring how things work, or why something might fail. Both communities are incredibly diverse, attracting developers from all sorts of programming backgrounds and companies. And both communities have scads of open source development at all project levels. There is, however, no CPAN equivalent yet for Java.

In general, I've found that folks around Perl are a bit more casual and freewheeling (although I suspect that part of this is living up to an existing reputation), but hanging around projects like JBoss or Struts for a while you'll see much the same sort of discussion and lively behavior.

FWIW, my 2c, etc.

Chris
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