Present a challenge to your superiors. Two teams, one writing the Java version, the other writing the Perl version. If the people on the Perl team are decent with the langague, they'll have the Perl version done while the Java people are still hagaling over the design.

The Perl team could probably be as small as one person. The success of Perl in this regard will depend heavily on that person's familiartiy with Perl and CPAN (which is true for any Perl project).

Your description of the actual program was a bit vague, but it sounds like something that I could whip up in an afternoon, including debugging. There might be details I'm not aware of, though.

Your superiors will no doubt think you're setting yourself up for disaster by having a team of only yourself against the company's Best and Brightest Java programmers. Again, the details of the application matter a lot here, but if you have more than passing familiarity with Perl and CPAN, you'll likely have your project done in at least 1/10th the time of the Java team.

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I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated