{"id":162,"date":"2019-04-11T16:38:30","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T14:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/25-years-of-php-history-and-curiosities-by-rasmus-lerdorf\/"},"modified":"2022-07-05T10:45:17","modified_gmt":"2022-07-05T08:45:17","slug":"25-years-of-php-history-and-curiosities-by-rasmus-lerdorf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/languages\/25-years-of-php-history-and-curiosities-by-rasmus-lerdorf\/","title":{"rendered":"25 years of PHP: history and curiosities by Rasmus Lerdorf"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you probably already know, PHP<\/span><\/strong> is one of the best-known server-side programming<\/span> language used in web applications<\/span>. Known by a lot of web developers<\/span>, it has been appreciated for being intuitive and easy to learn, but also often criticised for some peculiar features incorporated in the design. The creator of PHP<\/span> is Rasmus Lerdorf<\/strong>, who was invited to deliver a speech during Codemotion Rome 2019<\/strong>, on the 25th anniversary of the first PHP<\/span> release.<\/p>\n

In this article, we will summarise the origins of PHP<\/span><\/strong> and some curious facts about it, inspired by Lerdorf\u2019s stories and facts discussed during his talk.<\/p>\n

In order to understand why and how PHP<\/span> originated in Lerdorf\u2019s mind, it is useful to provide a bit<\/span> of an overview of the context in which it was born. In the early \u201890s, the Internet was very different from now. Browsers had very limited options and developers<\/span> had much fewer options than now to implement web servers<\/span>. Just to give you an example, the following snippet (shown by Lerdorf during his talk) is an example of how a basic web server<\/span> was written using C<\/span> in 1993:<\/p>\n