Reading that article was pretty frustrating for me. Sure, if somebody decides to sit down and start writing a complex WebApp or program in direct PHP it can be a hodge-podge, however, if you were to use many of the frameworks out there you can get a very positive, and consistent experience, while also enjoying all the benefits of PHP's widespread adoption and support.
For example NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com), which provides just that sort of abstraction. NOLOH devs never even need to really know that they're in PHP. You would never know it from the consistent and elegant code, or the numerous syntactic sugars that make coding in it a joy. While none of this is out of the box in PHP, once you add NOLOH, poof, wonderful, clean, and consistent language, with language features that rival many others. Furthermore, any PHP environment can benefit from this, including all shared hosting users.
Thus in my opinion it's never that clear cut to suggest, oh PHP is crap, it's terrible, I hate working with it, because the language is flexible enough that you can write a framework that makes programming in it a joy. Now, if you were to ask me if I would use PHP without NOLOH that would be difficult. I've done it before, and it isn't so bad, but I would likely only go so far to a small script, or a small WebApp.
We do offer open-source projects license, and have an open-source guarantee. Meaning that if anything should happen to us the source-code would be opened. We're currently designing a clearer product section that details the guarantee along with clearer descriptions of the free and commercial license options.
For example NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com), which provides just that sort of abstraction. NOLOH devs never even need to really know that they're in PHP. You would never know it from the consistent and elegant code, or the numerous syntactic sugars that make coding in it a joy. While none of this is out of the box in PHP, once you add NOLOH, poof, wonderful, clean, and consistent language, with language features that rival many others. Furthermore, any PHP environment can benefit from this, including all shared hosting users.
Thus in my opinion it's never that clear cut to suggest, oh PHP is crap, it's terrible, I hate working with it, because the language is flexible enough that you can write a framework that makes programming in it a joy. Now, if you were to ask me if I would use PHP without NOLOH that would be difficult. I've done it before, and it isn't so bad, but I would likely only go so far to a small script, or a small WebApp.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH