30 years of PHP
Intro
Around 30 years ago, Rasmus Lerdorf was trying to build a templating engine to allow for easier website building in C. Its purpose was to generate with more ease the HTML pages on the server side. The name of the engine was PHP, Personal Home Page.
Considering the context back then, with the web being in its infancy, but showing a lot of exciting potential, the need for a framework to build websites easier is obvious.
A few years later, PHP got a template engine (Smarty). Yes, the template engine got a template engine.
Fast forward 10 years, a new object model was created in order to fix previous models.
Even the name changed, PHP was now "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", a recursive acronym.
I think it’s safe to say that the original plan changed quite a bit down the line.
My story with PHP
When I was in high school I built my first website for a school project - it was the periodic table of elements. I was very excited about building things that could be part of the Internet! I wanted to make things more dynamic. Before that point I was just copy/pasting JS code from various websites to make things seem more dynamic. Back then, there weren't a lot of resources to learn JavaScript from.
My story with PHP started in my first year of college.
A friend who was a “Webmaster” suggested that I should try PHP and MySQL as they are easy to learn.
I wish I could say that I got a job right away, but things in the early 2000’s weren’t that great, there weren’t many jobs for junior programmers.
Before I landed my first job, I was at an interview at a company and told them I was excited about PHP, to which the manager laughed and told me I should learn a real programming language, like FoxPro! At that time, PHP was very much regarded as a toy language.
Not long after, I finally landed my first job as a programmer. I was so excited and terrified of how much I didn’t know.
It turns out that PHP was a great option at the time, there were a lot of career opportunities, it was its golden age. Frameworks and platforms were popping all around. Smarty, CakePHP, Symfony, Wordpress, Magento and many many others.
I had the opportunity to work for all kinds of clients, some barely had any customers, others had millions of users.
It was a cool and trendy language used by many companies, including Yahoo! and Facebook. Even Google was using it for the merchandise shop.
I’ve used it on and off for 16 years and I would enjoying using it again if the right opportunity appears.
The downfall
On one not so special day in 2017, while working as a Magento 2 developer, someone told me that it wasn’t as easy as it used to be to find programmers, young programmers don’t consider PHP as cool. This was a shock to me as the language was still very exciting, there were plenty of jobs and new and interesting features appearing all the time.
But yes, that was the beginning of the downfall of PHP, for reasons that are not very clear to me.
Languages like Node.js began to really take off, that became the “cool” kid on the block. People were complaining about PHP’s dynamic nature and using Node.js as an alternative.
Last year someone was joking “at least we are not doing PHP”, I wasn’t amused, we are doing Erlang. If you wonder why there are still more PHP projects then Erlang, you should start learning Erlang, I'm sure you’re not going to ask that question again when you’ll know it well enough.
This year at FOSDEM, I had a discussion with some other dev about PHP. He was joking about how bad it was, I asked him what made it so bad, and it turns out that he never worked with it, but he had some very good examples of major issues, most of which were fixed with PHP 5.3, which was released in 2009, 16 years ago.
Speaking of FOSDEM, the first time I went to the conference, more than a decade ago, PHP had an amphitheater, a huge place and lots of people. After a few years it moved to a big room, still plenty of space and plenty of people. Last time PHP had a room there was in 2019, a small room for only about 50 people.
While PHP is far from extinct, it’s a shame that it’s losing its popularity after it has become so advanced. It’s a good example of technology that did nothing wrong, yet started to be phased out of use.
Epilogue
PHP has risen, taken over the world, but now, it seems like it has lost its shine. The market is changing, other languages have appeared, with new frameworks and with different approaches to programming.
While many people complain about its limitations, it’s been used in systems from small blogs to tech giants, from small shopping carts to mission critical infrastructure.
It may shine again, or it may just become a language in maintenance. Whatever the future will bring, I want to wish it a happy birthday, and thank you for the ride! It's been a great journey!