Python is an interpreted language, that competes for the same niche as Perl and has similar capabilities.
However, it has a completely different philosophy with different syntax and conventions.
It has a "There's one way to do it" Philosophy which enables people to understand and modify each other's code. (contrast to Perl's "There's more than one way to do it.")
Uses whitespace for indentation, which makes embedding it inside text templates more difficult.
Somewhat slower than Perl in most cases, but still quite fast enough for most needs.