Personally, I use Perl for small-ish programs (roughly less than a thousand lines, counting comments and long text constants such as SQL queries) dealing mostly

Personally, I use Perl for small-ish programs (roughly less than a thousand lines, counting comments and long text constants such as SQL queries) dealing mostly with text, and in that area it is fairly hard to beat. Also, while Python's library ecosystem has grown a lot over the years, in Perl you can find so many modules on CPAN, ranging from very common tasks (like talking to a database / ldap directory / network service) through fairly exotic (at least in my perception: e.g. formatting datetime values in just the right way to feed them to MS SQL Server, figuring out if a given day is a holiday in a given federal state of Germany) to downright silly (but in a clever way: CPAN's ACME::* branch). You think of it, CPAN probably has it. One thing I have grown to appreciate about Perl is its mentality of helping you getting the job done no matter what. Python is a - relatively - clean and simple language, where Perl is not ashamed to be messy, but it's oh-so-useful I just cannot stay mad at it. ;-) Last but not least, the Perl community is awesome, there are so many friendly and helpful people around willing to share insights, code, and words of encouragement. (That is not to say other languages have bad communities, not at all!)