The debate of Perl vs Python is very much religious. As a Developer one must choose his tool carefully. It is all about the task and the tool best suited for both of the above programming language has different goal and comparing them is a unfruitful task.
And in my point of view Python is better than Perl. Because python is useful to create many tools,Like bioinformatics, many other areas share the problem of dealing with "big data" and Data Mining. In industry and computer science, Python (and Java) is more common than Perl in these areas. You may find programming in Python beneficial because you would be able to leverage the work and infrastructure of others in related fields.