Perl was a possibility, but CGI is/was a pain to use. To get started you had to understand things like headers. You frequently had scripts refusing to run for whitespace issues relating to CRLF vs LF. You'd need to come up with your own templating language... It was just much more difficult.

Also Perl libraries typically require superuser rights to install. That's a big deal if you're a poor student using shared hosting on your fun hacking projects.

Python really wasn't an option. mod_python by default required you to restart Apache whenever a python file changed. It was designed to be configured by sysadmins on dedicated servers... if you wanted something you could hack together an put on a shared host, it just wasn't an option.

Also the hot Python framework in 2003 was Zope. No one uses Zope anymore. For good reason.

Ruby was much smaller, and this was pre-rails so it didn't have any significant web framework. I'm not even sure if there was a production ready way of hosting ruby scripts.