Well, whether you have to install a lot or not doesn't depend so much on the language, as well as on the "vendor" of the application.

I've installed many commercial products, written in C, Java, and even (partially) in Perl that don't send you to install hell. It doesn't conflict with an existing Java or Perl installation. It doesn't require you to hunt down libraries or modules which may or may not install. It comes with all bundled. I've added a complete Perl distro to the software my employer at the time was producing, just because I prefered to write some supporting scripts in Perl instead of shell or C and wanted to be sure perl was on the system.

Yes, that may mean you have five installations of Java and six times perl on the box. The price of the extra diskspace is well worth the ease of installment.

Now, I'm not suggesting you should include perl to every little application you want to distribute. But you may want to bundle in the modules your application depends on. (Of course, if you distribute your application for free, you're free to do whatever pleases you ;-))