I think you may have missed the main point of this article. As an example, I can code to a reasonable standard in Ruby, C and PHP but I mainly work in PHP because if time or budget is low I can speed up development by writing horrible procedural code or other hack-jobs. I'd love to build MVC applications with well-structured architecture all day but many clients just won't pay for backend nicety. From an engineering perspective this is a horrible trade off but from a business point of view it's just what needs to be done sometimes, and I don't believe any other platform offers this.
PHP generally allows developers to just get up and go, both in terms of installing it on a server and building an application, and requires minimal learning. Unfortunately that does mean you end up with a large number of substandard developers, but at least they're getting things done.
EDIT: it's also perfectly possible to clean PHP up using e.g. autoloaders and the builtin interfaces and spl classes, if you want to work cleanly - this capability seems wholly underused outside of frameworks and I hope it gains more attention soon.
PHP generally allows developers to just get up and go, both in terms of installing it on a server and building an application, and requires minimal learning. Unfortunately that does mean you end up with a large number of substandard developers, but at least they're getting things done.
EDIT: it's also perfectly possible to clean PHP up using e.g. autoloaders and the builtin interfaces and spl classes, if you want to work cleanly - this capability seems wholly underused outside of frameworks and I hope it gains more attention soon.