Ah man, so you have java zealots too, eh? Well I feel your pain. I do feel that Java is a fair (notice I did not say good) language to use when you are amongst a lot of incompetant programs that need high-chairs and seat-belts to keep them from hurting themselves. It is easy for someone without discipline to lose an arm and a leg in perl. *HOWEVER* despite Perl being dangerous at the syntax level, Java is dangerous at the design level. The typical style encouraged by Java, and yes, evidencided by Java's own SDK, is an OO design which is not OO, and is in fact misleading -- essentially dropping encapsulation in favor of getters/setters everywhere, and also it shows massive problems in the overuse of the "inheritance is my hammer" phenomenon. Though I doubt you can win the war every time, a few things to remind folks about is that...

1) Perl is faster and lighter for smaller apps.
2) Perl requires less development time
3) Perl is not controlled by Sun, thus anyone can submit bugs and they might actually get fixed. BugParade is a joke.
4) Perl is *much* better at file I/O and integration with the OS, while Java makes a point of removing functionality that is OS specific.
5) Perl offers a wider range of IPC options through CPAN, while Java offers the propretiary, haphazard RMI as a major selling point. Also Java XML parsers are not automagical as is XML::Simple.
6) Perl has CPAN. What does Java have?
7) Perl solutions will likely have less lines of code and will be easier to maintain
8) Java has a huge memory footprint for the JVM and this will get larger as you load more classes into memory. Perl doesn't have this problem on the same scale.

The most ignorant statement I heard was from a manager (not at my company, an older one) that said anything that can be done in Perl can be done in a shell script. True, I guess, but he was probably familar with the works of baby-perl scripters, and didn't really see the beauty in the language.

In all, I still think Perl is dangerous for larger apps, merely because it is loosely tied together and a little random. But I love that. With great power comes great responsibility, or some such.

I don't know how you really live with Java zealots, though, that's the hard part for me. I see crippled software with widely exposed interfaces, bad OO design everywhere, and they think they are doing it right -- but hey, I'm the low guy on the totem poll, eh? So what if I have the C.S. degree and they are math/business/tech school folks, right?

Good luck in this one, and may the force be with you. Java is not better than Perl. They are entirely different animals. Perl, in many things is better than Java. Java has a leg up in industry acceptance and is a better tool for CONFORMISTS. I'm only hoping Perl6 can be expedited and become a buzzword in itself, since the rigidity is greatly needed in winning the war.

Folks say there is no war, pick what you want, but when it's Java jobs eliminating Perl jobs, well, that's less Perl. I for one write Java and C/C++ for a living, and Perl scripts when I can. I get little credit for my C/C++ and Java, but the few Perl scripts I've written for build engineering, automation, and so on usually leave jaws dropping. I'm incorporating Perl applications where I can -- but fighting the bias against Perl means I can't rewrite all of our broken software in Perl just yet....