Do you think perl would have been much better? Either way, the point that he was making was that there were pretty slim pickings back then. Certainly the dominant languages/frameworks of WD these days (python, ruby, node) didn't exist. Or by another token, the only dominant one that was also strong back then is PHP, the one they chose.
Python was over ten years old in 2003. In Python web development there had already been CGIs, mod_python and two major releases of Zope, with hope of Zope 3 on the horizon.
I'm aware that they existed, but clearly they were very immature as compared to how they are now. PHP on the other hand was in it's heyday, and (clearly) fulfilled all of the needs of Zuckerberg and the other developers. A suggestion at the time that they use a language like ruby or python would probably never have been made, and for good reason - and it almost certainly wouldn't have been adopted. It's just not realistic to suggest that early FB had this vast array of choices for which language to use.
