"Instead comparing PHP to Lisp for that purpose, I'd be more interested in a comparison between PHP and Python or PHP and Ruby."
I agree. More to the point, it would be more interesting to compare PHP frameworks to Rails or Django, as Ruby and Python are more general purpose languages and PHP, while it can be used for other things, is built to generate HTML.
The original (quite lame) article is in the lines that "I tried to use this ocean liner to go to the supermarket and it is infinitely less convenient than the car I was used to. Nobody should use ocean liners because cars are more convenient". It´s awful.