I felt like I was reading a "Why PHP sucks..." article.

Pretty much so. It is one of the easiest to learn, almost everybody gets at least the basics, the codebase is huge, and it works on all platforms, err.. continents, modulo tiny accent issues.

His reference to a simplified English (already established in aerospace) seemed like an under-appreciated concept. Why not have a standard simplified language construct? Much like we do with Javascript.