I have been known to put forth a thousand and one reasons to love Perl, and an equal number of things that I want to see fixed in Java. Well, for the last three years I have professionally been programming in Java exclusively, and even more telling, I write Java code in my spare time, too. So I suppose it is time to come clean and update the official party line.

• I still maintain that a team of skilled developers can be more productive using dynamic languages such as Perl (or Python, or Ruby), and that they will enjoy it more, too.
• I also concede that for a development environment that consists of bigger teams with significant member turnover and programmers of varying skill levels, the restrictions on style and the relative verbosity that Java enforces can be very helpful to ensure a minimum code quality.
• While Java development requires a lot of tooling that a dynamic programmer could do without, once you get used to the tools, which are now very mature and numerous, they can do amazing things for you, most of which depend on deriving useful information from the Java code, something that is very hard to do in a dynamic language.
• Much of the boilerplate traditionally necessary in Java has been eliminated with the release of Java 5 and EJB 3. Most of what is left can be automatically created by tools.
• Regardless of the Java language, the Java Virtual Machine, especially Sun's Hotspot VM, is a remarkable piece of technology (I hear that Microsoft's Common Language Runtime deserves an equal amount of respect). It is not to Perl's advantage that both Python and Ruby, as well as a couple of hot new languages like Scala, can run on top of the JVM, whereas Perl does not.
• I like Sun Microsystems themselves, especially since they have started embracing the open source model in earnest.
• I still don't like PHP.

A Programming Note concerning Thilo's Tech Radio: To celebrate the occasion let us all listen to an excellent episode of the Java Posse. The recording quality is a bit poor, but the content is excellent.

In order to include programmes from outside the IT Conversations Network, I had to move the RSS file to my own server, so please re-subscribe to the new feed (put together using the very promising Spokenword site, currently in public alpha).

• Monuments
• Pepper
• Red November
• Carcassonne: Mayflower