When did the original article ever suggest that? I got the impression that he had looked it up in the docs, and found the docs seriously broken. That fits my recollection of PHP's docs - there are a lot of them, but they often don't tell you what you need to know, so you have to go trawl through the comments. Of course, most of the code in the comments is crap, full of errors, has security holes or all three.
> function called strpos instead of str_pos - really, that's your problem?
Yes, that's a problem. Ditto for arguments in random order. It means that it's much harder to remember the function without having the docs open in another window.
"PHP sucks, nobody should use it, anybody who uses it is an idiot"? Sounds about right. I know people who are security consultants, who've worked with PHP for years and years - I even know a guy who works at Wordpress. None of them think that you should be using PHP...
PHP has some wrong design decisions, however many of them don't really matter (like function called strpos instead of str_pos - really, that's your problem?). Some do, and people are welcome to propose solutions for them. People also welcome to write rants about "PHP sucks, nobody should use it, anybody who uses it is an idiot" but they shouldn't expect this will be taken seriously.