Perl is more convenient to program in, but not necessarily faster (well, programming time is usually faster, runtime may be slower). Although I did get the perl version runtime down from about 10 seconds to a couple of seconds by just making the program a bit more perlish:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $maxprimes=100;
my $value=1;
my $count=0;
my $start=time();
print "Printing the first $maxprimes numbers that are prime... \n";
while ($count < $maxprimes)
{
   my $v = $value++;
   my $composite;
   OUTER:
      for my $i (2..$v)
      {
         INNER:
            for my $j ($i..$v)
            {
               if (($j*$i) == $value)
               {
                  $composite=1;#true
                  last OUTER;
               }
            }
      }
      if (! $composite)
      {
         $count++;
         print "$value is prime\n";
      }
}
my $time = (time() - $start);
print "Took $time seconds.\n";
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