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"...the whole sense of encouraging all of your html, code, bindings, javascript, even sql into a single file seems like a nightmare."

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. There are a bunch of php frameworks out there that take care of this for you, but they're not needed if you don't want to use them. I use to bash PHP all the time until I actually used it. It works well for what it is. As long as you follow well layered/decoupled programming practices it's fine.

Agreed -- I use PHP daily and have no need to combine data acquisition, processing or display/presentation into one file.
My method of separating different parts can be a little crude if not handled properly, but I use a PHP layer for DB-abstraction where possible (this is the hardest part IMO), a PHP layer on top for pre-output processing and user input handling, Smarty (http://smarty.php.net) for the HTML layer which I prefer to combine with Javascript personally, then separate CSS file to complete it.

The author is a moron. No one in the php community encourages this.

Calling the author a moron doesn't really help your point....

But I do agree that this is a badly written article, with little point. You can take bad code examples in any language and make claims about the inferiority of it.

It appears that the author has not fully understood the breadth of PHP and has taken the basics at face value. Any programming language can be abused and use to create code that is a nightmare to maintain.

The good thing about PHP is that it is quite easy to create your own UI layer without the tight strictures of other programming models. You can create class libraries and use those for printing to the screen. This does mean more work but for some projects, this flexibility might be preferable to the tight strictures of Java or .NET.

The followup article is now out: http://www.dzone.com/links/followup_to_i_will_never_understand_the_appeal_of.html