I've always found Perl just plain ugly, too clever about some things (like iterating over regex matches on stdin or something) and really dumb about other things (variable syntax, the god-awful OOP system). Python is clean and pretty in comparison and usually well thought out. If the communities were reversed, I'd still prefer Python: I just read the documentation in 99% of cases, I very rarely need to interact with the community. Python, as the article says, is mostly not a language for fans - it's mostly for auxiliary tasks.