You could also accidentally summon an Ancient One while trying to write a regex :D
Perl is a fine language, but it's like using a wood chipper with no safeties. It takes extreme care and know-how to use it without splattering ASCII everywhere and making an unmaintainable write-only mess.
For every beautiful and maintainable perl program (mostly irssi scripts) I've seen 99 abominations that are quicker to rewrite completely than decode wtf they are doing.
You run it by saying `python hello.py`.
Compare that to the amount of crap you need(ed) with 2005 Java just to have something running.
The shittiness of ActivePython and generally getting python to run on Windows were a bit of a hurdle, but still it was easier than the competition