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I feel certain that an entire generation of careers started from Rasmus Lerdorf's little hobby project. Despite the fact that things like Perl Mason, Tcl web ap

I feel certain that an entire generation of careers started from Rasmus Lerdorf's little hobby project. Despite the fact that things like Perl Mason, Tcl web apps, and your bog standard CGI scripts already existed, nothing compared to PHP's wild grab bag of a standard library, and above all, the documentation with user-contributed notes and examples (not to mention that there was nothing similar/free in Windows-land). In some ways, that incredible ease of use of PHP for backend mirrored the ease of use of Macromedia Flash for animators and front-end/UX designers, which also led to a generation of middle schoolers and high schoolers tinkering and learning from each other and accidentally falling into a real career path. Thank you Rasmus and PHP team... despite all the warts PHP gets often-deserved flack for, you have undoubtedly changed the lives of, quite possibly, hundreds of thousands of people who would never have become professional developers without the easy on-ramp that your creation provided.

geitir 5y ago
It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow
- aeontech 5y ago
  Yes! I don't think people who started in the modern age can even relate to how amazing this was, to have a documentation site with a built-in user comment system collecting errata, tips, pointers and snippets (even as erroneous as they sometimes were)... This was before the embarrassment of riches that we have now... - before proliferation of open source examples on GitHub, - before StackOverflow, - before jsfiddles, - before snippets on gist or pastebin - before very common web forums (many of which were eventually written in PHP in fact)... - before fantastic search results of google... Best you could hope for when you got stuck? Someone's personal web page, or usenet and mailing lists...
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - simon1ltd 5y ago
    The search engines weren't great -- I think I had the best luck with Altavista. It's almost impossible to convey how different the 'web was back then. Searching mailing list or usenet archives was the only way to track down examples most of the time.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
PHP 3 is what started the careers and it comes from Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. I'm sure Rasmus Ledorf has pulled his weight throughout the entire thing but without the Zend Engine PHP would have never became what it is today.

geitir 5y ago

It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow

aeontech 5y ago
Yes! I don't think people who started in the modern age can even relate to how amazing this was, to have a documentation site with a built-in user comment system collecting errata, tips, pointers and snippets (even as erroneous as they sometimes were)... This was before the embarrassment of riches that we have now... - before proliferation of open source examples on GitHub, - before StackOverflow, - before jsfiddles, - before snippets on gist or pastebin - before very common web forums (many of which were eventually written in PHP in fact)... - before fantastic search results of google... Best you could hope for when you got stuck? Someone's personal web page, or usenet and mailing lists...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- simon1ltd 5y ago
  The search engines weren't great -- I think I had the best luck with Altavista. It's almost impossible to convey how different the 'web was back then. Searching mailing list or usenet archives was the only way to track down examples most of the time.

that_guy_iain 5y ago

PHP 3 is what started the careers and it comes from Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. I'm sure Rasmus Ledorf has pulled his weight throughout the entire thing but without the Zend Engine PHP would have never became what it is today.