My problem is that it wasn't implemented _correctly_. If you're going to implement a feature, do it right or don't do it at all. Their lack of concern or pride in their project does not bode well for the community.
I'm not a part of the community, and I'm no longer a PHP developer (if I can help it) but I can't think of any other reason the global functions would still have inconsistent argument orders almost 14 years on. So, if the 'correctness' of their implementation bothers you, do what I did: move on. Because it will never get any better.
Incidentally, I wrote an anti-PHP rant last year called "Why PHP Won" that made its rounds here. It's pretty easy to get fed up with PHP, especially when you know there's better stuff out there. Once you're at that point though, you're done. It's anything-else time.
That said, in direct reference to your post: so what? My point still stands. I don't disagree with your assessment of the way it implements those features, I just don't think that it means "there is no hope for PHP", and I don't think it's at all productive to waste time complaining that it doesn't behave the way you want it to.
PHP -- and most other languages -- do have the power to "hack something together". You just have to be willing to adapt to the system at hand.
But there's a bit of a delta between this and the attention-grabbing title of the post.
It reminds me of a time when I had to maintain some very large programs written 100% in AWK - talk about a limited feature set - you had to work with a more limited set of functions and features, but often led to some creative solutions.
"PHP is as "complete" as it needs to be for us."
It's so complete that it's painful to write in? There's something to be said for languages that focus on a particular application while peripheral features suffer, but the PHP language is in no way superior to Python or Ruby, even in regards to web development, and there's no problem with saying so.
People use PHP because lots of other people know it, and because it's widely available. Those aren't merits of the language itself. Yes, good things can be written in PHP. That doesn't mean the language isn't demonstrably inferior.
I can see however that coming from a language like Python or Ruby, you're probably going to try to develop in PHP like you would in one of those languages - and I believe that is where frustration will be found. I think it's good to think of PHP as a "simpler" language - stick with the basics and it will work well (as well as be pretty fast).
"I don't have any issues with writing PHP - it just works for me."
Ummmm, wrong! The author isn't saying "PHP sucks because it doesn't have closures like my favorite language, so it's dead to me!". The author is saying "PHP claims to support closures, but when you actually attempt to use them for anything useful, they're broken."
So what he's actually cursing is that he has a round hole, and something that looks like a round peg, except it's really not.
That said, this article, and every other one like it, reeks of some strange belief that every single language is supposed to have all of the features of some programmer's favorite language, as well as all of the neat new trendy stuff, and if the language doesn't support all of that -- well then it's dead! Or dying. Or "a husk".
There doesn't seem to be any realization on the part of the programmer that a particular language is just a tool, usually designed for a specific application. The programmer is attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole, and they're cursing at the square peg because it doesn't fit.
Let's take one example: closures. They sounded interesting, and potentially could solve a problem in a large JavaScript library I was working on. So I got to know them, I practiced with them, I made sure I grokked them before trying to apply them. Then I put them to work, and found that they ended up making my library unnecessarily complex, that they caused some odd behaviors occasionally, and that they didn't solve any problem that I couldn't more easily solve using simpler methods.
So, does PHP's lack of this author's favorite features really make it a "husk"? No, not at all. Applications as large and complex as osCommerce don't rely on those language features; they rely on the features that the language does have, and they work just fine.
One of the most basic skills programmers need to have in their toolbox is the ability to adapt their habits according to the tools they're using. The programmers that spend their time writing blog posts like this one don't seem to have picked that up.
...Ugh, this just cost me 10 minutes that I could've spent actually working on one of my projects. :-(