

PHP's creator offers his thoughts on the PHP phenomenon, what shaped and motivated the language, and where the PHP movement is heading - vaksel
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/php_experts/rasmus_php.html

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davidw
Rasmus is a smart guy and worth listening to, but this article is ancient
(Apache 1.3? PHP for 'nearly' 10 years?)

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tvon
Yeah, I like PHP quite a bit for the instant gratification, it definitely has
the quickest zero-to-dynamic-content rate in the world today[1] (though I
can't speak for Windows systems, dunno what has the lowest barriers of entry
for an aspiring, Windows-based geek)..

But, the landscape has changed drastically since this article has written. I
guess I'd consider PHP the second generation of web development platforms[2],
with CGI being the first. Not to say PHP is going away, but it's certainly not
a phenomenon at this stage in the game, its a de-facto tool but it's facing an
uphill battle to stay important (IMO), the phenomena today are Rails, Django
and the slew of 3rd generation tools that accompany them.

[1] before anyone argues, it's basically test.php:

<? print 'hello ' . $_GET['hello'] ?>

and then <http://localhost/~user/test.php?hello=world>

The tools are ubiquitous enough that setup is a non-issue.

[2] I'd say that our better, late 2nd and early 3rd generation tools lowered
some barriers to development and allowed us to rethink the web and how we were
building it, which led to "Web 2.0".

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donaq
Rails and Django are frameworks, not languages, of which PHP also has a few,
for example, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc.

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scorxn
That's what struck me about this article. PHP arose as a framework between C
and Apache. It makes one wonder, what's the threshold between framework and
language?

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davidw
PHP was and is a language. Apache has always had a fairly accessible API. The
two are quite different things.

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csomar
The article is old no?

Since, now PHP is even bigger! You don't have to build projects you just hack,
there's infinity of Open Source Prjects in PHP. It's the Choice number 1 for
web developement.

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bartl
The sample code from that pre-PHP thing makes me cringe:

    
    
        <!--sql database select * from table where user='$username'-->
    

Oh yeah. I can see this ultimately leading to PHP, complete with either "Bobby
Tables" vulnerability, or alternatively with Magic Quotes. Bad, from the
start.

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alanthonyc
php is a movement?

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paulgb
On a few occasions I would have certainly said PHP qualified as a movement.
Particularly under definition 6b: <http://www.answers.com/movement>

