In 2003 PHP was already the most popular web dev language and web dev was where the action was and the transition to PHP4 from PHP3 was pretty smooth. This article points out that he's got code stuck on Python 2.x, Python is not doing well on the current hotmess (mobile) and it's not now and never has been as popular as PHP. How is this similar?
You're taking things too literally. I took PHP as a language that was very popular for web apps in the past, and much less so nowadays. PHP's popularity for the web in 2003 is not dissimilar to Python's popularity for the web in 2012.
Anyone predicting in 2003 that PHP would become less popular and/or suitable for the web would've turned out to be right. Yet, I bet anybody who might've made such a prediction just learned a new language (maybe even Python) and is still enjoying creating great software just like back then.
