I hate to be a naysayer, but this often-expressed sentiment (by pg himself no less, if memory serves) seems somewhat absurd. Perhaps I am a slow learner, but it took me roughly 6-10 years of writing software, learning programming languages, studying CS fundamentals, learning about libraries, APIs, network protocols, character encodings, security and too many other things to enumerate until I really felt comfortable in my ability as a programmer. The first programs I ever wrote were awful; I looked at them again for the first time in years a while back and was shocked at how bad they were. Even after picking up a programming language or two and learning just enough other stuff to be dangerous, my code was still crap, albeit better crap. It wasn't until years later that I was regularly producing what I now consider to be "good code."
The spirit of this post is admirable, but rather than producing more successful startups it will likely only spur the unqualified but ambitious to create nasty spaghetti-coded PHP monstrosities with gaping security holes, which will only serve to make the public at large less trusting of web apps and startups in general. Steve Huffman was a Real Programmer when he wrote the first version Reddit; heck, he even used Common Lisp! ... and he also stored user passwords in plain text. Imagine what those with even less knowledge and skill are capable of doing.
In closing, the people here are either:
a) much smarter than I am and much faster learners;
b) trying to falsely give others the impression of (a);
c) too optimistic;
d) or don't remember how bad a programmer they were when they first started.