I've programmed in PHP for many years and still use it for my side projects, but I would state that the criticism in the article is mostly fair and relevant. Yes, as an environment PHP is easy to deploy, fairly well-documented and has some other nice benefits (like shared-nothing architecture, build-in templating or the ability to write config files using core syntax). However, as a programming language PHP is pretty awful. Worse, the issues it has are glaringly obvious and not that difficult to fix, if you're willing to break some compatibility, which it regularly does anyway.

It would be better for everyone if people could mentally separate PHP's features and misfeatures and learn from both, instead of just bashing the language and jumping to its defense as a whole.