I'm actually the reverse. I went to perl from python. I usually use it for system scripting and what I like about it is that it replaces bash nicely without removing the power of specialized syntax. I find it much easier to type open("program -args |") than to construct a subprocess object in python and manually extract lines from its output. On the other hand, python is pretty handy for larger programs, more than a few screens of dense perl syntax starts getting hard on the eyes.