Here's a little exercise that should demonstrate that Python is a more natural scripting language option than Perl. This is but one of many possible examples.
The task: Trim leading and trailing whitespace from a string.
my $msg = " spacey string "; $msg =~ s/^\s+//; $msg =~ s/\s+$//;
Requires knowledge of regular expressions and then mental parsing of the regular expression to know what's going on. Or some comments.
msg = " spacey string " msg = msg.strip()
It's nice to be able to easily read code.