Question regarding choice of python

[Amitabha Roy]

I am curious as to why redhat chose python as the language to code
the user interfaces to many of the system tools. I am assuming
that system-config-network etc, all were written by redhat people
and most of them were written in python (with gtk).

Was there any discussion as to the benefits of python over other alternatives
(tcl-tk, perl etc) ?  

Amitabha