I can tell you my reasons: the market. Not all of us can roll a globe, close our eyes, pinpoint a place and tomorrow have a job there. Here where I live, about 80% of webdev jobs are PHP. Even when I do manage to get a Ruby or a Python job, chances are that I will be doing lots of PHP code maintenance and migration anyway. I would like to change it, and I don't know better than to advocate, pro and against.
I'm getting the impression that this is why a lot of people hate PHP - Money. People don't like that the market is full of money wasted on an inferior language. Perhaps there's a bit of envy in that, perhaps not.
The winners in the marketplace aren't always the best, and it's not easy to change minds. People get religious about the things that make their living, whether it be a programming language, certification/designation or some other thing.
But Atheists aren't going to convert many Christians and Christians aren't going to convert many Scientologists.
In the end, you have to work within the parameters of the market or create your own. I guess for some people, like the OP, it's easier to vent. Nothing wrong with that - we should all speak our minds, but it's not necessarily going to be effective in converting anyone.
Look at the resulting discussion here, the OP's either preaching to the choir, or his message is falling on deaf ears. I don't see a lot of 'a-ha, he's right, I'm switching now' posts.
> the OP's either preaching to the choir, or his message is falling on deaf ears.
That was the point of the post. If he points people to it, and they read it but still disagree that PHP is crap, then there's obviously no hope for them.
Yeah, but why would you care unless you're begrudgingly participating in the PHP industry? It's not your problem unless you make it your problem - i.e., if you're so against it, don't work in a PHP shop, don't take PHP contracts. Problem solved - if other people want to use lame/bad languages, who cares?
The impression I'm getting is that a segment people who hate on PHP are participating in the PHP economy because there aren't as many local opportunities in {insert language here}. To me, that's not much different from the guy who's stuck working in a "lowly" coffee shop because he can't find a job in his field of study, which of course, makes him entitled to be rude to customers and his fellow employees.
The money is nice, but after watching the ridiculous waste of PHP idiocy for the Nth time, you can't help but want to get people to stop.
At least with PHP it's likely to be some vaguely HTTP/POST-ish interface, not some XML/WSDL monstrosity...
And, unlike you, I don't think these articles are pointless. I hope they help PHP get more bad reputation among coders, and peer pressure will do the rest.
Bashing and negativity is not the way to do it.
You'll get much farther showing a PHP person something more interesting (whether it be Rails, Django, or whatever) and highlighting all the cool things about it. Because that person will not be on the defensive, his/her mind will be way more likely to have that 'Wow, that's so cool I should try it' moment.