As someone who happily runs FreeRadius on his 1500 I'd say go strawberry perl. It has an option to uncompress an archive that works outside of anything else. It comes with scripts to run to setup the env to make the perl env run.
I basically do this for windows hosts that I don't have admin rights on and i'm having a Perl AA issue because I didn't call a friend. In these trying times we just have to pick ourselves up and forgive our digressions.. then remember...
We have the OpenBSD team to thank for OpenSSH. Those fine folks are awesome and still include Perl in their base OS.
Perl still has a place on decent unix systems.
Side note.. I gag when I have to do regex in Python. Everything else, no major complaints.
Final side note. When checkpoint starts shipping a way to verify the authenticity of all binaries on a system i'll start to worry about support getting their undies in a bind about 3rd party software being installed.