Writing perl^W^WEfficiently writing in perl in fact is so effective that I(/you) will take the speed issue for granted when most of what you write is for one-time use or for use that doesn't require the speed. I write perl and C and Java everyday and curse at C and Java quite a lot for not allowing me to write «my $c = 1;» instead of «int c = 1;» or «private static long c = 1;» or whatever it takes for a local/lexical variable to get in scope.

I find myself write less and less C as I can do almost anything in perl, and write it over ten times as fast in code that is easier to maintain. Some projects however still need perl: the code cannot be shared by law and perl has no good code-hiding feature.

Defining a useful data model in C might be quite a challenge. The autovivication in perl is a joy compared to how to deal with data in C and - even worse - in Java.

Compared to C and Java, changing data-structures, return types etc is so much easier.

I never wrote anything in python. I however read a lot of python scripts, mainly to fix bugs. I've read enough not to like it. Ruby on the other hand really looked as a good alternative when I would require a good OO scripting language. Python has - in the past - quite often said that they do not suffer from version incompatibilities, but to be honest, that is completely untrue: they suffer just as bad as any other (scripting) language. Most reasons for digging in python where just because of that.