Can you expand on this?

Also, what do you prefer over Python?

Python and perl are very very similar. Python prioritises expressiveness over uniformity, perl is the opposite. Perl's original OO mechanism was stolen from pythons, but due to the greater flexibility it means that there's a lot of choice and perl's extended OO capabilities exceed that of python. Personally I hate the way that the python people keep bagging out perl when it's clear they know little about it.

I don't have preferences as such. My main problem is that over the past few years my perl skills have been in such high demand that I haven't had much time to do substantial other programming stuff (this is a class of problem you want to have). I have been playing with python's maths libraries (particularly sympy) lately, and along with jupyter it's pretty neat stuff.

umm uniformity over expressiveness