What's the 2-3 line alternative to perl you are referring to?
I find piping into python to be a lot more than 2-3 lines before I'm even ready to do any manipulation of input, which again can get quite verbose. So I'm guessing it is not python.
There's -p too, -0777 works for slurp mode, throw in -rjson to get battery-included pretty_generate, interpolation can be nicer, but $_ is not implicitly used so it can get a bit more verbose than Perl.
When you're talking about doing things interactively (in a shell, either directly via a terminal or indirectly via an editor) then the constant factors matter far more than the asymptotics. This has always been perl's target for optimization. That's why it has a million obscure operators that no other language has.
I find piping into python to be a lot more than 2-3 lines before I'm even ready to do any manipulation of input, which again can get quite verbose. So I'm guessing it is not python.