I loved using Perl for projects in the early days of the Web. For anything even remotely expressive or artistic, Perl was the way to go. But if you want to communicate scientific insight, using the write-only language is something I have to maintain my doubts. But, if Inline::Python works as well as the comments above indicate, then I might be tempted again. Number crunching in Python, pretty pictures and presentation in Perl.. Hmm.
Don't worry, I think Perl is good. I like the freedom you get when writing it. It's especially good at tasks that shell is just not quite expressive enough for. I used it heavily in a sysadmin job and it was way easier than writing ansible scripts.
The only thing holding me back is if I want to use ${library} I probably can't do so from Perl.
