Ok, so Oracle owns the copyright on the code, but not on the name of the language, and that's why the judge says it's questionable whether "languages" can be copyrighted? That seems like hair-splitting to me, but I guess that's what courts are for.

I didn't mean that Perl is unique in separating (or not separating) grammar from functionality. I just meant that if you take away the support libraries -- the modules, which I'm thinking of as the API, analogous to Java's class libraries -- you still have something that's identifiably Perl. This doesn't look like anything but Perl, as far as I know:

With Java, on the other hand, if you remove the classes, what you have left doesn't look much different from several other C-style languages. (To my knowledge; admittedly I haven't used Java in a few years, and was never an expert.) Since software copyright infringement often comes down to how much you copied the "look and feel," it seems like Google might have an easier time making their case with Java than if they were using Perl. But I'm just spitballing; I don't know anything about the legalities or details here.