It could have used a good "Perl: the Good Parts" book.

With a team where everybody wrote it in a similar style, Perl did perfectly well. Mod_perl was fast. I liked Perl.

Then Django came out, and then Numpy, and Perl lost. But Python is still so incredibly slow....

Check out "Perl Best Practices" by Damien Conway, and the more recent "Modern Perl" by Chromatic. Both can be had as paperbacks, and I think both are also available free on online.

Mostly - from here - python is so incredibly slow to write. Who has this kind of time?