PHP celebrates 25 years and works towards version 8.0 of the language
PHP is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. It was first created by Rasmus Lerdorf as a way to track visits to his website.
By: Jenna Sargent | SDTimes.
The language started off as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in C, JetBrains explained in a blog post. The first suite of PHP scripts were named “Personal Home Page Tools,” or PHP Tools, though nowadays it is known by a recursive initialism: “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.”
The third iteration of PHP, released in 1998, was the result of Andi Gutman and Zeev Suraski rewriting the existing interpreter written by Lerdorf. This version, PHP 3.0, is the first version of PHP that resembles what the language looks like today, JetBrains explained. Together the two formed the company Zend, which continues to contribute to and be actively involved with PHP to this day.
The language continued to evolve over a 20-year time period, without a formal specification. It wasn’t until 2014 that a specification for PHP existed. The PHP Language Specification was developed internally at Facebook, and then transferred to the public domain.
In addition to this anniversary, PHP 8.0 is also expected to release this year. Brent Roose, programmer and /r/php moderator, has revealed upcoming features in PHP 8.0, which is expected to be released in December 2020. The first alpha of this version will be released on June 18. Roose, PHP 8.0 will introduce multiple breaking changes, as well as new features like the JIT compiler, union types, and attributes.
