Dear brothers, urgent help is needed! My company is going to halt all development on Perl in favour of Java. The following were the arguments they came up with.

1) To consolidate the total number of languages in use by the Competency, leading to more efficient use of staff

2) Unsuitability of the language itself for large-scale development i.e poor IDE support, debugging support, GUI, Web work, etc - this was documented in the "Mid Range Language Strategy Document" last year.

3) There's nothing you can do in Perl that you can't do in Java. This position was cemented by the Perl-Java bake-off which demonstrated Java to be at least equivalent in speed to Perl and after much grunting this was accepted, except by some "old crusties", I suspect mainly for INERTIA reasons.

4) In fact with the new design reviews, any Perl implementations will not get past that gate.

The only valid uses of Perl are:

1) utility scripting

2) legacy apps


As you can see, the person who came up with these "accusations" doesn't really have much idea about Perl, and certainly not the wonderful things Perl can do. And most of all, the honor of us Perl programmers are at stake.

Please help me to formulate a strong argument against these senseless accusations and show him that Perl is a truly elegant language and can do whatever Java does in less time.

Thanks very much in advance.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.