The History of PHP

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development. It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a way to track visitors to his personal website. PHP has since evolved into a powerful and versatile language that is used by millions of developers around the world. The history of PHP can be divided into several phases: The early years (1994-1997): In the early years, PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts written in the C programming language. It was used to track visitors to Lerdorf's personal website and to generate dynamic content. The growth years (1997-2004): In the late 1990s, PHP began to grow in popularity. It was adopted by a number of large websites, including Yahoo! and Wikipedia. During this period, PHP was also extended with a number of new features, such as support for databases and object-oriented programming. The mature years (2004-present): In the past decade, PHP has continued to grow in popularity. It is now one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and it is used by a wide range of websites, including Facebook, WordPress, and Joomla. During this period, PHP has also been updated with a number of new features, such as support for Unicode and improved performance.