>What flaws are these?

Have you ever seen this piece? http://tnx.nl/php.html

Some of the issues mentioned have been dealt with in PHP5 but a lot of the problems will probably be there permanently, such as inconsistent function names, arguments and return values mentioned at the top of the piece.

That isn't an insult to people using PHP. Much like I sometimes say that soda sucks without implying that soda drinkers suck, he's saying that PHP sucks without implying that PHP users suck.

When you insult something that is part of ones persona, you are insulting that person. Soda is an awful thing to compare to something that someone has spent a decade of their life expressing themselves with.

If all of what you've written is in earnest, then you've just insulted many soda lovers.

That said, the solution isn't to walk on eggshells around every topic that anyone could possibly have identified with. The solution is to be very, very cautious about making anything so much a part of one's persona that a stranger's critique of that thing feels personal.

Integers becoming 32-bit or 64-bit depending on CPU architecture, bad character-set support, comparison and identity is wacky. If anything of that has changed since last time I looked, all the better :).

He didn't insult you or slam you. He was talking about the language. You can make really neat things with a language that's really bad. Just don't take it personally.