First up, you have picked one of perls strongest features to beat one of Java's weakest. If you compared opening a window and displaying a list of selections, I think I know which language would come out ahead.

And now to the debate. The fantastic people who designed perl made some particular choices about the functionality they were going to build into perl. The possibly fantastic people who wrote Java made different choices. Why did the perl designers stop at map and split and not continue to give us commands like 'load_and_split'?

Why did the Java designers stop long before that? I suspect that the Java designers were expecting people to write classes like 'load_and_split' and share them around. But for various reasons the Java community doesn't work like the perl community and so these higher level functions don't get passed around.

If there was a decent string library produced by someone, then java would win in your example because all average java programmers would be using GNU.string.file_load_and_split( FH, "\W") or however you would say it in Java. But we ended up with the great designers somehow and so we have the great functions that do just enough and not too much.

If Dr Conway hadn't found perl you might have found java developers touting their Conway.quantum.superpositions or Wall.array.map functions as being the epitomy of programming.

Perl people seem to delight in commands which are powerful but still somehow clear. Java people seem to love lots of code. But there's no reason why de facto standard class libraries couldn't be generated and passed around

However given the amount of head kicking it takes to get people to use CGI and strict here at the monastery, I imagine you could never get Java developers to use other peoples classes. They'd always be whinging about how they could do it faster or one line less or something. Sounds kinda familiar actually...

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.