Agreed that Python still isn't as good at Perl at command-line scripting (which isn't a denigration; Python is good at it, but Perl was born for it). Also agreed that Python's current trajectory is buoyed by data science (compare Ruby, whose ascent via the web went hand-in-hand with Python, but which never took off for other domains and faded as new languages entered the web space). But that's a separate phenomenon, and probably has even less to do with comparisons between Python's and Perl's syntax (for years the data science crowd has been demanding more syntax from Python, e.g. a dedicated operator for matrix multiplication).