Programmers from all over the globe depend on the PHP language to develop a wide range of products and services. PHP is one of the most popular server-side scripting languages in the world and is used to create dynamic websites.
It is a widely used language that powers many popular websites and applications, such as Facebook, WordPress, and Joomla.
Here are 14 interesting facts about PHP that you may not have known.
- PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page,” but now stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor“.
- Rasmus Lerdorf developed the original version of PHP in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language. The purpose was to replace certain tasks previously performed by Perl scripts to track visits to his online resume and handle user requests from the server’s log files.
- The PHP Group now maintains PHP. It is an international association of PHP developers responsible for the development, maintenance, and promotion of the PHP programming language.
- The big blue elephant is the official mascot of PHP. Its name is ElePHPant.
- PHP is used to power over 78% of websites on the internet. This includes popular websites such as Facebook, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia.
- By 2017, there were over 240 million domains running on some kind of PHP framework or CMS platforms powered by this language, making it one of the most popular options for web development projects today. Some examples are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and Magento; e-commerce platforms such as Shopify; CRM systems like Vtiger; forums such as phpBB; and more.
- In 1997, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote PHP’s core functionality, resulting in what we know today as “PHP 3″ which was officially released with much improved features compared to all its predecessors. This version of PHP introduced many features that are still used in the language, such as the ability to embed HTML code into the language, and the ability to create dynamic web pages.
- PHP 4 was released on May 22, 2000 and powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, a virtual machine designed to interpret and execute PHP code.
- PHP 5 brought object-oriented programming support to the language, but this was met with criticism due to its lack of native Unicode support at the core language level. To rectify this, Andrei Zmievski released the first version of the Unicode Extension in 2005. This was the first step towards providing full Unicode support for the PHP language. Since then, the Unicode Extension has been integrated into the PHP core and is part of the standard language. This allows developers to use Unicode strings, manipulate them, and convert them to other encoding.
- PHP is a server-side scripting language that uses multiple programming paradigms, including procedural programming, object oriented programming, and a combination of the two. It is typically embedded within HTML files. This allows developers to combine HTML and PHP code to generate dynamic content, which is then sent to the user’s browser. PHP is a popular choice for developing websites, web applications, and even mobile apps.
- PHP is free and open source.
- PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and many others. This makes it a highly versatile language for web developers, as they can easily develop applications that run on different operating systems without having to rewrite the code for each platform.
- There are no officially documented specifications or standards for PHP. This means there are no rules or guidelines that must be followed when writing code in PHP.
- Some of the most popular PHP frameworks and CMSes include WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter and Drupal.
These are just a few of the interesting facts about PHP. It is a powerful language used by millions of developers around the world. If you are looking to create dynamic websites, PHP is an excellent choice.
