This isn't true in any other field of software development. Has the author not wondered why web development is in such a state of flux? The answer is that the whole concept is a hack - using a document markup system to deliver applications was a poor reinvention of the old thin client idea. Any programmer worth his salt could see this, and so all the early tech like PHP was 'designed' by people who couldn't design. Since then smarter people have tried to fix it, but it's still layer upon layer of hacks, which is why it requires entirely new hacks every year.