One former fan of Python, I work with, used to sing the praise of Python. Then a year after I first met him, he was slamming Python as "pseudo code with a fragile, indentation based syntax".

While he still prefers PHP over Perl, he long ago stopped complaining that our department's go to "Swiss Army Knife" for creating custom tools is Perl. Our build system is the duet of Perl and make. We convert field test and simulation data using Perl. Our release packaging system runs on Perl. Heck, even the Test Engineering department uses Perl to make their test stands work together (and some of the test stands do run on Perl).