Chad Perrin wrote:
Perl really strikes me as the clear winner
I'm really reluctant to get involved in this discussion, but I'll pitch in here. In practice, I've found that the only way to keep shared Perl codebases from turning into a heaping pile of craptitude is to have them hacked on exclusively by people with pretty deep Perl expertise, which tends to not be the case for (most) open source projects that aren't centered around the language. Your mileage may certainly vary.
FWIW, after reaching the second to last stage of Nat Torkington's 'Seven stages of a Perl programmer,' and using Perl as a primary language for more years than I care to count, I've personally found Zen in Python.