Considering that maybe your boss, being a Senior VP, isn't very sensible to the language's specs, I'd try a more high level approach:
- Perl is an Open Source language with world wide support of a large enthusiastic community independent from 3rd party corporate interests - A lot has been done through the years to enrich the language (CPAN) - It's no spring chicken. Perl has been around for many years, and it's used because it's good, not because someone sold it as vaporware very well - Being also free, in case your boss changes his mind later, there is no risk of regretting some big licenses investment - Perl is quite lightweight and tipycally does not need big hardware or expensive application servers to run, like Java does - If finding Java programmers is easier, then finding bad Java programmers also is. Quality and quantity differ. - A bad OO Java architecture has tipycally tragic performance problems and is hard to reengineer. A poorly implemented Perl architecture is more easily tuned and fixed - EAR deployment consumes too much development time - Perl also runs everywhere Of course there are pros and cons. I can tell you that by my experience that Java sells better as a concept (it helped to sell lots of computer mags in the past) But at the end of the day, Perl applications are usually much more flexible for changing and tunning. The simple thought of EJB and EJB-QL makes me be sure of this. Cya :)
