I think Perl was very tied to Unix idioms. I love the language to this day and found it incredibly expressive for developing small order of magnitude programs.

I think Perl was very tied to Unix idioms. I love the language to this day and found it incredibly expressive for developing small order of magnitude programs. Python was more opinionated, and better able to integrate with external libraries. A lot of the heavy lift in python is really invoking external code from elsewhere. You can solve “real” problems with readable code without the learning curve of C or Java.