There was a long time period (IMHO good few years in early 2000s) where Python looked better on paper but Perl was still better for production. All the Perl li

There was a long time period (IMHO good few years in early 2000s) where Python looked better on paper but Perl was still better for production. All the Perl libraries for doing certain things (db access, web stuff, process management) were "actually battle tested" and worked well even if they were utterly unreadable. Python looked a lot nicer but when you tried to do any real work with it everything seemed to leak memory or give you continuous paper cuts - and it was a lot slower. I made the switch to Python eventually but it took a while.