The creator of PHP speaks out to explain and defend his creation. If you have ever criticized PHP, or have avoided it because others have, it might be time to give it a second chance.

PHP is an old language - not as old as Fortran say, but a year older than Java at 25 and yet we do not think of PHP as being an innovator or important like Java. Part of the reason is that early versions of PHP were focused on easy-to-use scripting and not on building "big" programs. Of course, as the web developed we needed more than scripts that added dates dynamically or animated a ticker tape. Slowly PHP acquired a full block-structured syntax, complete with functions, then objects and today it even has optional typing. It seems that all languages, if left long enough, acquire all of the features of other languages. If you hate PHP today it has to be because of some old feature that it hasn't been able to get rid of.

Language purity aside, what always amazes me when I work with PHP is the way that there is always a function that does what you want. You want to convert a jpeg or a gif into a thumbnail - no problem, there's a function for that. There are so many high-level functions that I mostly have to spend some time finding what I'm looking for and then just call it. PHP is the toolkit language.

Now take a look at the video of PHP's creator Rasmus Lerdorf talking about the old days, how PHP has evolved and why you should not only use it but use the latest version:

Now I have a question for you. Why isn't Rasmus Lerdorf a name known as well as that of  Guido van Rossum,  Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, ...

Is PHP just this "get the job done" language that we just don't want to talk about?

More Information

https://www.zend.com/

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