If backticks are good enough for them, then they don't need the more complex usecases that Popen allows, so just tell them to use check_call or check_output. As far as they should be concerned, the subprocess module has two functions that are straightforward to use.
And those functions are more convenient than the default behavior of backticks, because they handle for you raising an exception if the subprocess fails.
Python:
import subprocess
output = subprocess.check_output('command')
Perl:
$output = `command`
die "failed: $output" if $?