it looks like it has been a while since anybody has generated a reply to this.

it sounds like people have forgotten that the language (Perl, Python, C/C++, Java, etc.) is the tool to do a job. if you have a substantial code base in a language then it does not matter what language is (allegedly) "better", you use the language you are already using. if you are rewriting code or starting from scratch then you can choose the "best" language for the job based on whatever criteria you have.

a good software developer should be able to learn any language in a reasonable period of time (but may take a long time to become an "expert" and know all of the "tricks"). the only thing that has caught my attention is the "formatting" requirement that appears to exist in Python - have not had to deal with that in a high level language since I used FORTRAN.