As an avid PHP user I'm afraid the remaining 1/3rd is truth, the article really is rather biased and in some places not really factual but I'm the last person to deny PHP can improve immensely in some area's.

I once went to a PHP uncon some years ago where 2 members of the php core/extensions team were present, when we got the chance to ask them questions I popped the question "Why doesn't php take the opportunity to fix a lot of the function naming issues, the incosistent argument order, etc ... when releasing the next major version" and their reply was that they don't want to break backwards compatibilty too much. That's plain BS imho. Any non-dot release can break backwards compatibility, especially if it moves the language forward.

Valid complains that can be made about it, just like about anything else? I've watched people who don't know C++ bitch about C++ for 15+ years referring to lists longer than this one, and it's still one of the most successful languages in the world. PHP is like the C++ of scripting languages - not the prettiest and there are plenty of things to (legitimately) complain about, but stable, well-understood and used by people who are interested in results rather than getting to those results in the most 'elegant' way.

White space.