PHP has a lot of quirks and inconsistencies in it that make many pieces of it confusing. Sometimes you have to look things up because they don't work the way you'd expect them to, and that slows you down. There's nothing that's really earth-shatteringly terrible about it, but people want things to be perfect. The truth is, no language is perfect, but perhaps PHP is less perfect than most others. (JavaScript has a ton of issues with it too, but for some reason people complain less about JS).
I guess people complain less about javascript because there is no alternative. In web development you are free to choose amount a variety of languages, but in frontend you are trapped.
It's a great article indeed, nice to see a framework built around a fresh concept. My only complain is that people like me, who were disconnected from PHP community for quite awhile, would like to hear more about base principles of Nooku, use-cases where it performs best, and so on without rushing to technical details so early.
Nice principles described. They are also mostly applied to front-end side. It's very sad that even PHP community now has frameworks with good design principles in a core, but JS community do not.
...'even PHP' - oh yeah! Let The War begin!
Looks like there are lots of interesting moves happened in PHP world since I had left it! Great writeup.