I think that exceptions are the reason many people want Java over Perl. If you code anything in java, if there's even a chance of it screwing up -- by throwing an exception -- the compiler will yelp and whine and tell you that you need to catch SomeException e. This forces bad coders to code for the worst case scenario in the way they normally wouldn't. However, I have always thought that the java exception paradigm is rather dumb in that Java doesn't know what worst case scenarios to look for, it just guesses. A human coder doing his job properly would put in place the checks that java forces, without taking into account the checks java forces which are unnecessary. Add to that the fact that java code can be ugly, and I understand why some managers think java is better. Java, in some ways, forces coders to do better work, because there are some perl programmers out there who won't do an or die($!) when they open a file, etc. However, again, the java compiler is dumb, and this can make a coder rely too much on the compiler to catch bugs -- which may make it even harder to debug the program.

As far as the lack of an IDE goes, your manager is dead wrong. Perl doesn't have a traditional IDE like Eclipse, or Netbeans because text editors like Emacs and Vi have all the functions of a traditional IDE. Perl also comes with a debugger, and you can get a Tk based front end for that if you don't like the command like. Add to that the fact that Tk and GTK offer widget sets comparable to Java, and you have another trump to the "Perl is command line only" argument