> I'm not exactly sure why I started reaching for Python instead. It's so much easier with perl to do things like backticks to call some utility, or to use system() and easily deal with its stdout and stdin, and I never have to do a Google search to figure out how to use a regular expression to process the output (whereas I almost always need to bring up the doc page for Python's re).

The thing I find easier in Perl than in the other languages I might reach for when doing a lot of quick scripting tasks is declaring nested data structures. It's easy in Perl because often you don't have to declare them--you just use them. And that means that you can often make major changes to how your data structures work with just small source changes.

For tasks where you need to process data from logs or text files or similar, but don't actually quite know what it is you need to be doing with the data so need a good bit of exploring/flailing to get your bearings, and then maybe a few iterations trying different approaches to figure out what structures you need, and you don't have a lot of time to think about it up front--in other words, data analysis improvisation, Perl shines.