It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s.<p>You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server.<p>I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP.
I feel certain that an entire generation of careers started from Rasmus Lerdorf's little hobby project. Despite the fact that things like Perl Mason, Tcl web apps, and your bog standard CGI scripts already existed, nothing compared to PHP's wild grab bag of a standard library, and above all, the documentation with user-contributed notes and examples (not to mention that there was nothing similar/free in Windows-land).<p>In some ways, that incredible ease of use of PHP for backend mirrored the ease of use of Macromedia Flash for animators and front-end/UX designers, which also led to a generation of middle schoolers and high schoolers tinkering and learning from each other and accidentally falling into a real career path.<p>Thank you Rasmus and PHP team... despite all the warts PHP gets often-deserved flack for, you have undoubtedly changed the lives of, quite possibly, hundreds of thousands of people who would never have become professional developers without the easy on-ramp that your creation provided.
"PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor was chosen as the official meaning of the PHP acronym with 53% of the votes."<p>For anyone curious I tallied the votes from the linked page:<p><pre><code> 57 PHP HTML Preprocessor
29 PHP Hypermedia Preprocessor
98 PHP Hypertext Preprocessor</code></pre>
I haven’t used PHP in years, but Laravel was <i>such</i> a fun and productive framework to work in. It really has a way of making you feel like a “code artisan”, something I typically only hear coming from Rails developers. In contrast, every Node app I’ve worked on has felt somewhat amateur, even if the code was high quality.
PHP is proof how little the core web technologies change over the years, even though so many new technologies have come after it.<p>Looking at this page I beleive I can still make a pretty decent website backend using vanilla php (including authentication) and a nice front end using plain old html and javascript from so many years ago.
Another fun piece of PHP history: The old leaked source code for Facebook's index.php and search.php circa 2007: <a href="https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406</a>
> This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-Unix background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. You can use it for commercial and/or non-commercial use all you want. You can give it to your friends, print it out and hang it on your wall or eat it for lunch. Welcome to the world of Open Source software! Smile, be happy, the world is good. For the full legalese, see the official license.<p>What a nice, whimsical message.
My company sent (or tried to send) money to Rasmus back in '95 to have him implement a feature we needed. I think he ended up adding our ask to PHP for free. Anyway, good times.
Someone from my dads office gave my some printed pages about ASP from MS. Until that time I was doing all my web dev in Perl (it was basically either that or c) with print "<HTML><BLINK>hello... et. After reading about ASP, I concocted my own miserable php-like thing in perl where you could put perl code in between <% %> to add logic. I tried to find the code (I have it somewhere in dropbox, I'm sure), but I remember I failed at doing it reliably with regexes, so I made a while(1) loop finding all open <% and close %>, escaping the html before and after, printing it and adding the code in between. It was only a handful of lines and worked really well; I wrote a lot of cgi for my clients with it.<p>But it was slow (even after adding cache) and it need quite a bit of setup and libraries (CPAN with my own layers to make it easier to use), so I was very happy when I discovered PHP 3 (I did not know it existed before that).<p>Good memories; deploying a site cheaply by scp/rsync the files.
That brings back fond memories. I used to package up a PHP installer (and a MySQL one) for macOS for many years, back when OS X was still new and it was a bit of work to build various UNIX open source projects from source.<p>My day job was Solaris/Linux work so I was used to it and I wanted PHP on my Mac, so I built the installer for myself and also put it on my website, where more and more people downloaded it from over the years.<p>I haven't used PHP in more than ten years and only recently started dabbling with web development again for fun. I am very happy with TypeScript + React on the client side and Python or Swift on the server side.
Around this time, I tried to create stuff with the old Java J2EE. I found it too slow to compile and the language was too inflexible.<p>So, without a framework, I built my project in PHP and finished it in a week.
PHP was a godsend, saving me from Perl. I switched to the Dark Side and prefer C# these days, but I still keep an eye on it just because there was some fun stuff I built with it.<p>Looking at that archived page brings back memories. Since I'd started with PHP/FI and I think I went on until 4.x, I'm pretty sure I saw that announcement when it actually came out.
Look at those gifs enabling the rounded corners.<p>And also remember how slow connections was back then so the progressive enhancement from square to round wasnt just a blink.<p>So many memories
While not written specifically for PHP, the Clean Code book from 2008 started to put the focus on Software Craftsmanship.<p>Too bad 10 years had to pass before Uncle Bob came along :)<p><a href="http://cleancoder.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cleancoder.com/</a><p>Clean Code, the book<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3735293-clean-code" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3735293-clean-code</a>
Everyone here is talking about how great PHP is, but why don't we consider it for use nowadays? I know some people still use it, but it's not really an option most people consider anymore. Is that just because it's not cool or modern anymore, or are there some fundamental problems with it that make it a non-starter?