I'm not sure I agree. Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't.

Modern JVMs are faster than the 1.1 or 1.2 JVMs, yes. But CPU speed has also more than doubled since then. More like 5 or 6 times speed boost. And memory is dirt cheap - I started with Java 1.1 on 168MB RAM. I'm now running perl on a machine with 4GB RAM. I'd wager that Moore's law has taken care of more of Java's speed problems than Java has.

Java still has a significant object overhead, even compared to perl's far-from-zero overhead. This puts an upper barrier on how fast the JVM can go. And you just can't do that much interesting in Java without objects.

What really gets me is the Java startup cost. Perl can compile, optimise, and execute some activities faster than Java can load, initialise itself, and execute a pre-compiled .class file. And then Perl has mod_perl to take care of that problem. Oh, no, sorry - that eliminates what little startup cost there is for perl, at least for a subset of the problem. Yes, you can do the same for Java. Memory usage shoots right up, though...

My last point is that the amount of abstraction you need to get a job done in perl is quite different from Java. Yes, in perl, you can go whole hog. In Java, you often don't have a choice but to go all the way.

I'm still way more productive in perl than my Java-writing peer. And he knows it. In the end, it doesn't matter to him because he still is getting paid, which is really the bottom line to him.