Perl grew organically from a really complex group of starting ideas, ie: the various command line programs he was trying to do without. This means lots of little rules to keep track of. I do not claim this is good.

Python has a logical design to start off with. This design supports real programs. Not having real experience in it, I can't say past that.

Since perl's "design" is mostly slapping sysadmin pieces together, it SHINES for those tasks, and can be abused for others. If someone already understands the bash/awk/grep/sed/tr/cut/paste pipelines, then pretty much everything they are used to doing on the command line can be written in a very short perl script, but with decent error checking and error recovery and logging, all the shit that is awful in standard shell programming.

If someone wants to argue that, I'd like them to play with the 'trap' in shell scripts to handle error conditions in a complex multi-script system. While simultaneously checking return codes from programs called and remember zero, ie: false, is good. And then realizing you gotta deal with the shift operator to deal with anything else. While pulling output from both STDOUT and STDERR (oh the fun of multiple substituted redirection to put things in log files. And processing the STDOUT at the same time in the next program. And using the 'test', ie: '[' program to handle the various inequalities. And abusing the shell to do decent math at the same time. And cut/paste pipelines are awful.

I found it amusing that jake's default thought concerning perl was for data processing rather than admin tasks. Most admins will NEVER be "real" programmers. It is a different mindset. But they need programming tools for short tasks. So perl took shell style command line programming brevity and added some nice wrappers around it. So it is a short jump for sysadmins to use it for their tasks, while not being required to adhere to a stronger "programming" philosophy. Sure, this annoys "real" programmers, but it is really the core use and "design" philosophy of the language.