When I was younger I used Perl for a lot of the things that I use Python for today: websites, command line tools, and one-off scripts. It's not a bad tool, and it has real strengths, especially for short one-off scripts.

I was in the pedantic "meaningful whitespace is evil" camp back then, so I avoided Python. Then I got an internship in a house that used Python. That forced me to give Python a real try and I got over the whitespace thing... I learned that for all intents and purposes this language I had been scoffing was a better tool for many of my usual Perl use cases and more thanks to its extensive standard library.

Why?