I absolutely agree, this article was a waste of time. His use of technology wasn't awe-inspiring either. He comes off as someone who is unfamiliar with PHP instead of an experienced user with a bone to pick.

I've worked in Java, PHP and Python. I personally prefer using Yii, phing along with PEAR and pecl libraries to anything else, at least with timeliness in mind.

Unlike Ruby and Python, PHP is a DSL, plain and simple. Yes, it's poorly designed. But it does what it was meant to do-- to build web apps-- quite well. It's up to the end user to write software that scales. And a lot of the scaling issues you'll see will be independent of language choice.