Twenty years of PHP

Yesterday 9 days ago it was PHP 20th birthday. Twenty years ago Rasmus Lerdorf released PHP 1.0, but it wasn’t until 8 years later when I had my first encounter with this language.

In 2003, I found out that anyone were able to make websites, that it wasn’t something just for big company to show their product and information. So started digging and searching on Altavista and Yahoo (Remember those search engine?), “where” and “how” do I start making websites.

I found Geocities, it was a great service from Yahoo. but as far as I remember it was only HTML, CSS, images and glitter, then I found Lycos, here I could upload PHP code and MySQL databases, it was all about CuteFTP and PHPMyAdmin. I uploaded CMS, forums, blogs (I think it were called news back then, don’t recall), and thousands of PHP scripts for any purpose, such as PHPNuke and PHPBB.

I didn’t know programming at all, but I loved how easy it was, you didn’t need to know OOP, just open a text editor and write some basic c-style code instruction and you are all set, no framework, no nothing.

I really learned how to program in PHP (or build websites) by analyzing for hours a pagination script, and since then I’ve been using and learning more and more PHP.

I’ve built so many sites, for different type of clients, I buy my first PC by selling my first website, a well-configured and customized PHP-Nuke script.

Until last year I thought PHP was death, but I realized that I was around different people, because I was surprised how many people still using php, so it makes go back to PHP.

I don’t mind the people who hate PHP and PHP Developers, the most common thing question I get after I say I’m a PHP developer is: “why?”.

Thanks to PHP I got into Web Development, and I love it.

I would like to thanks: Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP core developers and the whole PHP community and web folks.