Bummer about Perl, because a stint with a slower machine taught me just how slow Python is. My Lua scripts were often done faster than Python starts up—even though the scripts were doing file i/o. So, for anything like personal productivity scripting, Python is bad. However Lua requires managing the runtime and modules—and I was thinking about dusting off Perl, since it's pretty fast and is just always around like Sh while not being garbage at data structures and code organization.