"Perl but readable" and "batteries included" are true but leave out some equally important things: The explicit reference / dereference business in Perl makes handling nested data structures pretty annoying and strongly guides programmers to avoid those, which has a lot of compounding effects to structure of prgorams. Also Python embraced multiplatform early on, and had eg excellent Windows support, whereas Perl was always Unix first. Also the culture is important. Python was always beginner-friendly whereas Perl people were less likely to suffer fools gladly.