That's a silly blogpost, to be honest. Any language provides what he descirbes under "State" if you run a script through some sort of CGI interface (I'm not very well informed on all the variations like FastCGI or httpd mod_<lang> stuff), which is roughly what PHP is doing too. Many languages (among which PHP too) have some web frameworks written in them which do complicate the applications, but for good: it's easier to write secure applications (at least against the most common attacks out there) with them. And then if you're gonna use PHP with some framework, then why bother the stupid language and not use a more proper one with a nice framework/library?
I think it is just the immediate mode, do a thing in a familiar environment and start making a web app. No dealing with tooling. No `pip install flask`. Nothing. Just write PHP and you have a web app. I was probably memeing a bit much there, but I think there were several solid points in the article. I would not reduce PHP to "run a script through some sort of CGI interface". I don't use PHP any more. Only Python so I pretty much agree on using a nice framework/library, but I still see this kind of casual dismissal of PHP. I think it has progressed enough to not be a toy language. It is no worse than JavaScript in terms of idiosyncrasies. It (PHP) has plenty of decent features these days and runs fast thanks to things like HHVM.
