ehh, I agree that its usually faster do do stuff in perl than in python, but if someone spent weeks doing something in python, that could be done in few minutes of perl, python is not the problem. And would probebly take them weeks to do it in perl as well.
There are things you can do in line of perl that will take you 5 -10 min in python, but once program goes above one liners, difference is not that big.
And of course, if you learned vim instead of emacs, you would be even faster :))
Programmers take great pride in freeing accountants and ware house workers from drudgery. But seldom do we look at our work in the same way.
In the real world, most software work is done very similar to digging coal mines with shovels. Laborious manual hand typing jobs.