[xmcqdpt2]

I've also used Perl for small utility programs (basically as a "enhanced" shell script). The problem with Docker or virtualenvs is that they greatly increase the installation complexity of your script.

For example, two years ago I wrote a small (50 LOC) Perl script to convert between two text format. On Unix you could install it by just putting the one file in /usr/bin. It would run in less than 1 ms, which was critical because it was repeatedly invoked by another (legacy) program. It was mostly a bunch of regex so it was natural to write it in Perl (or awk maybe but I don't know awk).

The python equivalent would have been at least 30x slower, significantly longer, less portable etc. Using docker just for this script would have been overkill. The only real alternative IMO would have been to make a statically compiled Go or Rust binary.