It's evolution. I like Python, it gets love and support. And it's all about the data structures - really. With python all I have to do is figure out the data - the rich set of OO, functional or imperative approaches and APIs does the rest.
Not ad-hominem but where were you 95-2006 because Gawk, Sed and Burne shell
were the answer to read only perl scripts. That is one of the reasons Perl is basically no longer used: it was used without discipline.
There was actually a progressive mode amongst those systems programmers I knew who knew what they were doing at the time.
* bash + sed for the easy stuff
* bash + gawk or just gawk for the ETL stuff
* TCL for systems glue + swig
* C when you are bespoke or need performance
Perl was great in theory but I cringed every time I saw a script.