The entire initial arguments of this article are just argumentum ad populum. Just a bunch of bullet points about popularity, finished up with the same round of

The entire initial arguments of this article are just argumentum ad populum. Just a bunch of bullet points about popularity, finished up with the same round of "good programmers write good code in any language." So, does that include Java, then? No? Ok. PHP is "designed for the web?" What does that even mean in this context? They never really explain it beyond saying PHP is tightly coupled to your webserver (which is not objectively a pro, not even close). Knowing my early history of PHP, it was originally closer to "cobbled together to get something to work for the web." There seems to be a weird, baked in idea that Java software is always bloated and PHP software cannot be. In other words, it's predicated on a language-agnostic idea, but it's applied directly to two languages. After all that, I find this highlight particularly hypocritical, since the article never actually offers any real benefits to PHP beyond "it's popular" and "it's for the web": > Letting someone sell you on a language (like Java) without having a full evaluation and discussions about architecture and design is like letting a home builder sell you on buying a house you’ve never seen because his contractors use only the latest and greatest hammer (or sledge hammer in the case of Java EE).