Having said that, java puts off a lot of people. Java, while it can perform, is very verbose. You cannot do terse things like complex sorting in say, 3 lines. In java, you create a comparator, and then you pass it to a sort function that does not accept anything but basic arrays. While creating the comparator allows for reuse and what not, it takes time to write. With perl and some other languages, you can express these things in fewer characters while losing only some of the readability -- but that's something one overcomes with experience.

If I'm writing say, something that deals with some complex form of matrix manipulations on various data, in perl, because it's not bound by data types like java, you can write something and debug quickly. Taking that solution and translating it to java could be argued faster than developing it alone in java. When people have questions on perlmonks, I doubt that people spend more than 10 minutes writing something down on the norm. Perl is like that. Doing a map on keys of a hash is really short and sweet. If you do something wrong, it's obvious to those better in perl, and is quickly fixable. In java, you have to compile and test.

Lastly, because it's compiled, it takes time to deal with things. I would equate the tediousness of dealing with compiling a bunch of sources, to setting up and deploying someone else's broken mod_perl. It takes time to deal with. It's not hard, but plain tedious.

I think PM is a place where people can exchange ideas on algorithms in a convenient way. Java junkies fails at this. The java questions I tend to have, is not because I don't know how to do neat tricks in java. There are few to be had. It's because of bad documentation, ala Apache Axis and using HTTP auth using dynamic proxies. It wound up being 1 line of java I didn't know and was documented nowhere. With perl, there are lots of tricks that can save time (writing or executing). Unfortunately, in perl, it's equally easy to trip up, i.e. $x=/(abc)/; if($1) {... } type errors. It doesn't make perl bad. It makes it more difficult, but that's because it's just that expresive. Java junkies may not take off like perlmonks has (over 4 years going?). But I've been wrong before. :)