1. Python was pretty popular well before entry-level programming courses adopted it. I think they adopted Python because it was a good general purpose scripting

1. Python was pretty popular well before entry-level programming courses adopted it. I think they adopted Python because it was a good general purpose scripting language, multiplatform, easy to install and get going, that taught programming concepts in a more approachable way for beginners. 2. Python on web servers was a thing long before 2012. You had Zope in 1998 or so, and it was pretty popular for a while, and hugely influential to subsequent web frameworks. Django came out in about 2005. TurboGears, Pylons in about 2005 or so. Flask in 2010... and these are just the more popular frameworks. 3. I think the author meant that PHP was also vaguely C-like in syntax, like JS. Keyword: vaguely. You had a common way of declaring stuff with curly braces and semi-colons.