I can understand a love of Perl by folks who love a good puzzle, or who are interested in "code golf" (trying to get something done in the fewest number of char

I can understand a love of Perl by folks who love a good puzzle, or who are interested in "code golf" (trying to get something done in the fewest number of characters). But those are not great traits for a general-purpose programming language. I agree with the other response: "Python just forces you to write code that's better for the team."