People disassemble .exes all the time

Not only disassemble, there are decompilers that produce c code. Naturally variable names are lost and optimizations produce changes so that the resulting source looks different to the original source, but still there is no need to go down to the hellish pits of assembly language.

Nevertheless it is a lot easier with interpreter languages like perl to get the source back. You pay for the comfort with openness. Not a bad deal in my view