I love Perl too, but it can very quickly become a "write only" language. Which is fine for what I make of it. One thing to consider is that scientists are not

I love Perl too, but it can very quickly become a "write only" language. Which is fine for what I make of it. One thing to consider is that scientists are not necessarily programmers, there is an overlap, especially in data science, but from my experience, they tend to write terrible code. It is not to be dismissive, it is just a different skill set, there would be no need for professional programmers if scientists could do better and vice versa. And Python is very interesting in that it is actually difficult to write terrible code with it, forced indentation and clean syntax certainly helps, it also heavily promotes the one "pythonic" way. Contrast with Perl "there is more than one way to do it" philosophy. It is not that you can't make a huge mess with Python, but it only tends to happen at the intermediate level, like when you are starting to write libraries but have not yet reached mastery.