You're confusing bare-minimum languages with bad languages. At my last job, I spent some time working in an arcane dialect of BASIC. There were two data types: strings and numbers. There appeared to be several array data types, but they were just a special syntax for creating strings delimited with three obscure Unicode characters (hopefully obscure enough not to show up in a string.) That was a bad language.
I also spent some time working in PHP. I begged to get PHP projects. I would have rather been working in Python or Perl. Or Ruby or Scala or Java or whatever. But PHP supplies the bare minimum I need to do my job.
At the same time, I don't think the author is talking about languages. The author is talking about tools in general. And I've seen a variety of tools written in PHP that are very poorly architected. And there the author's premise holds true: I'm going to spend a lot of time working on that poorly architected PHP code until I make it better.
In fact, the good vs. bad programmer is something of a distraction. If a tool requires a lot of maintenance, it's a bad tool. If it's a bad tool, programmers will spend a lot more time dealing with it than with good tools.
I also spent some time working in PHP. I begged to get PHP projects. I would have rather been working in Python or Perl. Or Ruby or Scala or Java or whatever. But PHP supplies the bare minimum I need to do my job.
At the same time, I don't think the author is talking about languages. The author is talking about tools in general. And I've seen a variety of tools written in PHP that are very poorly architected. And there the author's premise holds true: I'm going to spend a lot of time working on that poorly architected PHP code until I make it better.
In fact, the good vs. bad programmer is something of a distraction. If a tool requires a lot of maintenance, it's a bad tool. If it's a bad tool, programmers will spend a lot more time dealing with it than with good tools.