I'm not the OP, but I've had a similar experience and agree with him about Perl. For me... * perl is a bit more intuitive, even though I've done about as much

I'm not the OP, but I've had a similar experience and agree with him about Perl. For me... * perl is a bit more intuitive, even though I've done about as much python as perl at this point. * It's the best language for dealing with regular expressions in my view. You don't have to create a regex object and muck about with all of that. * You can create lambdas/closures with fewer restrictions than Python (this is a big one) * CPAN is pretty good. Python comes with a lot of libraries, so this isn't as much of an edge as it used to be. * It is more widely available on other servers, even older ones, which is important for me because I'll sometimes have to do work on a machine without Python already installed. I can work with older perl and I've never been on a machine without it installed. * The whitespace issue really is annoying to me. With braces you can move stuff in and out of conditionals, etc, easier than with Python, even with editor support. As for readability, I try to write reasonably well, even if in a hurry. I know the language and its syntax. I understand the purpose and meaning of the sigils, so it doesn't look like noise to me anymore than reasonably written python. In Python, for instance, I've seen list comprehensions that are pretty frustrating to puzzle through. Perl with strict and warnings and written without a specific aim to be clever isn't hard to read.