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I vote for Python and I'm ready to to defend it with religious ferocity. Bring it on!
Anyway, the arguments you'll likely hear brought up in favor of Perl are:
Perl has maintained backward compatibility, while Python just didn't care
Perl's syntax, which doesn't enforce whitespacing and which is closer to shell script, is preferred by some
Whether you find those to be compelling is a matter of personal preference.
Perhaps it would be more productive if you could narrow down which industry you plan to go into (web development? film production? scientific computing? system administration?), and describe the programming projects you intend to work on? What's widely used in one field might be less widely used in another.
Why choose? To be honest, once you've learned one of them, the other isn't that hard to pick up. In my field (bioinformatics), both languages are in use. There does tend to be an age split (older folks using perl, younger ones Python), but it makes zero difference in terms of productivity. I also have yet to run into a problem where one language succeeds but the other fails.
Yes, imo it is better to know both (and possibly ruby and more) when passing a job interview. Even if perl is older, you may find some maintenance perl scripts left by ancient admins at the work place
Also knowing php-cli can be useful. These script languages aren't that different, to tell the truth. (Let's note that python and python3 are different languages, though.)
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