I don't know how popular the language was, but I distinctly remember it was seen as unfit for "enterprise" work. This was a time where the Serious devs would do SOAP, CORBA and other boilerplate-heavy RPC. Python was always branded "bad performance because of PIL", because multi-threading was gonna be the future anyway.

I don't know how popular Python was, but I remember it was a "toy" language, and when Reddit rewrote their whole website in it a few years later (2005? 2007?) it was seen as a bold risky move.