Regardless, I think this is a pretty cool idea. It seems like a lot of effort to emulate what's (arguably) a missing language feature, but for those of us who are stuck in PHP for one reason or another, it's an interesting development.
And I think you're right that YC's commenters are by and large not PHP developers. I've only known a couple of real hackers that work in PHP, and even they didn't work in it by choice. Though it makes me a little sad to say this because PHP was the first language I learned (hooray sentiment!), I hope PHP dies off soon. It has matured in recent years, but unfortunately not in any new directions. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of PHP programmers are idiots who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, and the better PHP hackers tend to be enterprise-y, as that's the direction PHP is headed nowadays.
I consider myself a pretty good PHP programmer, but you're right, most of them out there don't deserve the title "programmer". I'm so disgusted by 99% of the open source PHP crap out there.
That said, I do look forward to learning new languages and new ways to develop on the web (what I really love doing).
In response to the first bit, a friend observed that Warnock applies.