That really depends on coding style, again. I find that common Java coding styles are hideously decompressed, and become far more readable if you do a few things per line instead of maybe half a thing. Even they aren't as bad as the worst C coding styles I've seen, though, where it takes like 7 lines to declare a function.

As for Perl vs Java... was it solved in Perl by a Regex? That's one case where if you don't know what you're doing, Java can end up really bloated but it usually doesn't need to be all that bad.