I’m going to go out on a limb and say: Perl is much better than Python for ad hoc data munging and management and it is the best high level language for terse one-offs written the way *you* think. As far as Big Data® goes, Python has better tools.
If you are an expert in either, the other will be fairly transparent anyway. A Perl expert will have no trouble using Python tools and understanding well written Python code and mostly vice versa. Perl can be harder, sometimes much harder, to follow because it can be written in so many different styles. At our shop we had a Perl hacker who wrote really clean Perl code but in Java idioms and it is truly a pain to follow that kind of over-engineered 15 packages for a single object and its functions kind of logic.
You’re the only one who will really know the answer. Like the others already said, it depends.
