Cassandra: 'Segmentation fault: 11' when trying to run any command in cqlsh

Trying to get cassandra running on my Mavericks laptop, I ran into an issue right away. Other posts mentioned JVM versions, but I upgraded that and made sure my brew stuff was all up to date.

There were no errors at all in the cassandra server logs, so I figured it must be something with Python, since cqlsh was running inside of Python.

Any time I would run a command (other than help) in cqlsh, I would get a "Segmentation fault: 11", with this in the details:

Process:         Python [35348]
Path:            /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python
Identifier:      Python
Version:         2.7.3 (2.7.3)
<snip>
Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000

This turned out to be a bug in Python < 2.7.6. An upgrade to Python 2.7.6 solved the issue.

A note on Python's site referred to

Python 2.7.6 was released on November 10, 2013. This is a 2.7 series bugfix release. Most importantly, it resolves an issue that caused the interactive prompt to crash on OS X 10.9. It also includes numerous bugfixes over 2.7.5.