On the future of Perl 5

In my (very limited) comparative experience, yes, you spend more writing
code in Python, at least if you need to do text parsing, but you get that
time back many times over when you need to debug & maintain your scripts.

Last experience I had with Perl was that Perl script took 15 min to write
and half an hour to debug, but still didn't work (due to some mysterious
side-effects). Writing the same straight forward text handling script in
Python took 20 min to write and 5 min to debug. All errors in Python code
were obvious to fix.

(After that I avoided Perl like plague and Python improved a lot since
90's...)