I wrote the original crawling code for the @tilde_fortune bot in perl. It's still there, the files are src/extract_users.pl and src/local_crawl.pl. But when I decided to store text in a sqlite3 database I ran into a roadblock when I discovered that the perl installation on tilde.club didn't include DBI.
So I checked whether it was possible with python and lo and behold the necessary packages were present. Rewrite the code in python? challenge accepted. It was easier than I expected and I really like python. Dare I say it but it is now my language-of-choice for small things like this. I'm so sorry, perl. I never thought this day would come.
I have googled how to do specific things in python but not really immersed myself in python culture/community so I have a feeling that my python code is not very pythonic (I think that's the word). Like, I'm not creating any classes. Just functions. eg:
add_users_to_db(get_users(user_url))
Verdict: python good.