From Simon Cozens’ weblog: Why Michael Schwern is not a Java programmer. I agree with some of his reasons, and disagree with others. If you’re writing code just for yourself, and you really grok all of the cool features in Perl, then his article makes sense. When you’re working on a team, and the people on the team all have different levels of understanding when it comes to the language that’s being used, then Perl can be and usually is an utter and complete train wreck. You can divide Perl programmers into two camps, those that can read the source code to CGI.pm and tell you how it works, and those that can’t. About 98% of the people who are Perl programmers can’t. These people are the ones who would be better off with a language that enforces a more disciplined approach, like Java.