Python vs. Perl

My dad's electrical engineering friends are bring up the old debate again, and some are trying to back up perl.

I need some good ammunition against Perl, courtesy of /prog/. Most likely something to poke fun at regex.

What I want to know is why the hell are regular expressions so hard? It's like someone decided one day, oh, I'm going to make something which does pattern matching and create the most bizarre ass-backwards bubble gum syntax for it. I honestly think whoever invented it is actually the greatest troll of all time, truly worthy of /prog/ trolls.