The thing for me
is that almost all of it is grabbing stuff out of mail logs so I can figure out which hosts/nets to tell to go fuck themselves. It works, it's fast, and I can have it output a command line which I can ssh on over to our firewall to run. Given that the repeatability of each of them is pretty low (and I've aliased the little routines I use a lot) it's a reasonable approach.
If I was doing stuff that ran over and over again on fresh data sets that basically resemble their forebears, I'd probably use javascript; we have a good intepreter and it's a lot more like the languages I learned on.
Think admin tool, rather than data analysis.
