I do hope his printed material is better readable than his blog. Of course it most is about taste, but I had to add some style changes before being able to read that without being ultimately annoyed by the layout and chosen fonts.

<style type="text/css">
  body               { font-family: DejaVu Sans; }
  pre, code, tt, kbd { font-family: DejaVu Sans Mono; }
  .wrapper           { max-width: 80%; }
  p                  { text-align: justify; }
  </style>
[download]

added to head did it for me. YMMV.

I have to (not really voluntary) do a lot of Java lately, and though I do not really dislike the language as such, I really hate the need of an IDE to be able to cooperate with others when using things like maven and jIndent.

What bothers me about Java is the way some (basic) classes are set up with missing functionality (but still about 20 methods I'd never use). What I *love* about Perl - compared to Java - it autovivivication. Building a short-living cashing construct in Perl is maybe about 4 lines. In Java it is likely to be 4 files of 100 lines each.

Development in Perl is way faster, and with some constructs being extremely long in Java, I sincerely doubt if what people applaud in Java as being maintainable and scalable holds in all/most cases.

All and all it is a nice read. I agree with quite a few points he makes, but (TIMTOWTDI) of course also not to all. Like e.g nested data structures difficult in Perl? I don't think so. Personally I see it way more easy in Perl than in Java. Autovivivication and pack/unpack are powertools missing in Java.