To answer your question, I'll once again just paste the same quote. Sure, there are good programmers out there. But PHP is a pretty good heuristic for this class of programmer.

> over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not.

There's no point in having a conversation if we all need to cheer on the article. Yeah, I've made up my mind. I think this article is misguided. No amount of technical changes to PHP changes legacy codebases or exactly the opening paragraph of the article that everybody seems to be ignoring.