Python wins out the popularity contest because of ease of readability that I think we can take for granted. Perl is true wizardry, I mean 'sigils' and stuff you need to know in order to make it work... Plenty harder to get at first glance for sure but it's truly occult in a lot of ways. I think that's kind of cool.

The way I see it is that you can do interesting things in pretty much every computer language written out there, it's just some are more arcane than others in some ways than others.

I remember when python started getting big and all the old perl heads were complaining about the forced indentation hahahaha