Darn them for picking the slower language with the weaker toolkit and uglier regex library.

It's all marketing hype. Python? Cooler? Cleaner than Perl? It's cleaner like VisualBasic is cleaner than Visual C++. That's not saying much. This is a shame, as I probably would have bought one just to write my own apps (if the toolkit was free). Not going to do that for Python!

My guess is this isn't a political decision at all, just that the programmers failed to get Perl working so they tried to convince management Python was better. Happens all the time.

I doubt "perl -MCPAN" would have worked on that smartphone anyway :)