It's definitely fashionable to hate on PHP but its modern incarnation has no more warts than JavaScript and the two languages are probably abused by developers at about the same rate.

Still, it would have been neat to see this headline read "Run Scheme in the browser through Babel" or similar.

I think modern PHP is worlds better than JS, simply because it has a larger standard library.

I'll take Laravel any day over express/sails/hapi/koa

Highly highly subjective, js is tiny compared to PHP so you have all the issues with what_some_one wanted toName a function vs the standard PHP way. Not to mention js is very composable compared to most PHP.