I guess you may have missed the accompanying HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3820431) where quite a few of the article's claims were challenged/rebuffed.

Just like Python, Perl, Rails, Node.js, and any other language out there. Why all the hate towards PHP?

"Rails" isn't a language, and PHP has fundamental design flaws that those other languages don't have. It's not that it has flaws, it's that it has unavoidable flaws.

It's something I find interesting. PHP "haters" keep pointing at flaws, yet in almost 10years of doing PHP, the only thing that really ever annoyed me is the string and array parameters order...

And I've done a wide range of thing in PHP, including scaling websites to millions of pageviews per day.

PHP might have design flaw, but in the end, they don't matter because they actually don't affect the day to day developer.

And I've tried my hands at Ruby, Python (still use it but more for scripting than web dev), C# (was actually my first language for webdev), and weirdly enough I find that they get in the way more that PHP does when it comes to building websites.

This is how I feel too. PHP to me has been ideal for getting things done, but I suppose those who harshly criticize it are concerned with some obscure purity that has less to do with getting things done than style preference.

Exactly, most PHP "haters" are bitching about personal preference and not anything that in the end, makes a difference.

Every language has flaws, may not be the same, but they still do... I am sure I can go dig up enough flaws in Python to write an article totalling 960 words on why it's so crappy too... But I am not, because it's dumb to nit pick at one language just because YOU don't like to use it.