Yes, these days, people are free to choose. However, after trying the alternatives, I think Perl is still a winner.
I spent some time (maybe 6 months) with Python recently. The first few weeks you're amazed at how uniform and regular everything is. It's so simple! But then after you've gotten used to Python, it starts to wear on you that there's no shortcuts for things that you do n times / day. And it's not just that Perl saves you typing, it's that Perl doesn't annoy experienced programmers by making them do every single thing the uniform (and longer) way over and over.
Another thing is naming. There are various clumsily-named things in Python. For example, "dictionary"? It's a hash. "Tuple"? I don't blame Guido, because I don't believe he's a native speaker of the rat's nest we call the English language, but it almost appears that some things are named different from the Perl-equivalents just to be different. Anyway, what you find after having used both Python and Perl is that Perl really does have that smooth well-worn "I use this every day and it fits like a glove" feel, and a lot of that has to do with well-chosen names for things, and operators that look like what they do.
Some more info about the platform is in [this fsf blog post](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone...).