Help me piece together a complete history of the PHP programming language and its community!
30yearsofphp
Today is PHP's 30iest birthday.
I started using PHP in 1997 or so, and together with Boris Erdmann and a few other people (Jan Kneschke, Ulf Wendel, Tatiana Nürnberg) created a thing called PHPLIB.
This was in the early days of PHP 3, and I think PHPLIB was the first thing trying to use the PHP object features. We found so many errors – I think Boris and I were responsible for 10 of 16 PHP 3 Beta-releases 🙂
But: It worked. It was even fast and convenient, and easily extensible in C and PHP itself.
Ten years ago, in 2015, I was invited to give a keynote on 20 years of PHP, and interviewed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiYmjd9MYzE
20 Years of PHP, a retroperspective
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEA9FfYAmNg
Interview
PHP today is a very different language than what it was 30 years or even 10 years ago. I mean, it is still mostly compatible, but modern syntax, modern type checking, and modern execution engines with just-in-time compilation put it into a different league.