Personal anecdote in support: my first job out of college was at a data-analysis company, where my task was usually to write one-off scripts to extract data from various data sources and massage it into the format the analysts wanted for their spreadsheets. I wrote most of those scripts in Perl at first, with the odd Bash script here and there. Then one of my coworkers said "Hey, if you like Perl, you'll love Python". I learned Python (2.1 was the most recent version at the time, which tells you how old this story is) and almost immediately switched over. All my new one-off data-extraction scripts from then on were written in Python (though still with the odd Bash script here and there).