Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002)

Don’t judge PHP by a 15-year-old interview with its creator. The internals have been completely rewritten by an incredibly talented team that continues to make improvements.<p>Also, many of the demons from PHP4 (in use in 2002) have been excised, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.php.net&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;remove_php4_constructors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.php.net&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;remove_php4_constructors</a>

One of the key reasons why PHP remains so widespread in use is the ease of deployment. No other language can match it.<p>PHP is the only language with almost universal support among web hosts. It can run on basic shared hosting plans and on nearly every server. It can be deployed by simply uploading your code to a directory on your web host. Sure, it&#x27;s a widely criticised language (even within the PHP community), but it still accounts for the vast majority of server side code (80% according to some sources).<p>What&#x27;s baffling is why other languages and so many developers are blind to this problem of easy server install. They think it&#x27;s a non-issue.<p>Prolific blogger and programmer, Jeff Attwood ranted about how he disliked PHP in one of his blog posts, but recognised that:<p><i>&quot;If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option.&quot;</i><p>To broaden choice, Attwood argues we should:<p><i>&quot;build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible.&quot;</i><p>That was written in 2012. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;the-php-singularity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;the-php-singularity&#x2F;</a>).<p>It&#x27;s 2017 and what&#x27;s changed? Nothing.<p>Having a ridiculously easy web app installation process for servers would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers. And it has, for many PHP open source projects and products.<p>Want your customers to self-install your software? Good luck getting them to do that <i>easily</i> with any language other than PHP.

PHP is a delight to work with, but that does not suit the signalling and over engineering crowd. We must recognize there is a social phenomenon evolving where some people seem to like complexity.<p>That&#x27;s why these developers are blind to ruby setup and dependency hell or nodejs insanity but magnify any self-perceived flaw in PHP without seeing the dissonance. This is a difficult act to pull off. This is so over the top and one sided it ceases to be useful.<p>Pandering to these criticisms will not work as they are not sincere and these developers are too caught up in how they are perceived to ever use PHP. Those who care for PHP should be concerned about attempts to pander to perceptions as this will destroy the accessibility and simplicity that makes PHP useful for everyone.

Rasmus should win a Turing award for bringing an easy to use web-centric server language to regular people. He does not get nearly the attention he deserves.

&gt;I got tired of rewriting the same code over and over again, and also <i>wanted to separate my business logic from my HTML layout</i>.<p>&gt; So I wrote a very simple tag parser that would parse through an HTML file looking for special markup tags and replace those special tags <i>with the result of my business logic code written in C</i>.<p>(emphasis my own)<p>I really like PHP, but I find it very interesting that Lerdorf doesn&#x27;t consider PHP code itself as business logic, but more of a templating language for the web.<p>A lot of PHP&#x27;s fundamental strengths and weaknesses make sense in that light.

It&#x27;s interesting to see how much the concept of &#x27;backend&#x27; and &#x27;frontend&#x27; changed over these years:<p>&gt; I personally use a combination of PHP and Perl for many of my projects: Perl mostly for back-end tasks, while I have PHP doing all the front-end work.

There&#x27;s an analogy that describes PHP as a weird sort of toolbox. Everything&#x27;s there, but they are all a little funky.<p>The hammer is a double sided claw hammer, the pliers don&#x27;t have serrated edges. They will do a job, but perhaps not the job that you expected.<p>Eventually it leads to everyone using this weird little toolbox ends up with a weird sort of house that might collapse at any moment.<p>Things have moved on quite a bit since then. Certainly in PHP 7, you&#x27;re able to give it the same treatment as a &quot;proper&quot; programming language and people do.<p>My view is though, it&#x27;s a little too late. I don&#x27;t think new people are coming into PHP because the barrier to entry has become higher than other languages.<p>It has become almost impossible to write a PHP application to do even the simplest task without getting bogged down in all sorts of over engineering and so called &quot;design patterns&quot;.<p>We all know PHP will be around for a while longer.<p>Yet in 2017, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend learning about PHP. Go learn something else.