Are you a PHP developer? Do you know all about PHP along with all these facts that I am presenting to you below? I bet you you don’t know at least 10 out of 20. You don’t believe me, lets read all 20 points below and find out how many of them you know already?
As a PHP developer you should know all these facts. I call them interesting because, almost all points surprised me. Though I am a PHP developer from the past 4 years but didn’t know all these facts.
- PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page.
- PHP which is now officially known as ‘Hypertext Preprocessor’ was released in the year 1995.
- Initially written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in ‘C’ (1994).
- PHP was originally designed to replace a set of Perl scripts to maintain his Personal Home Pages (also known as PHP).
- PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. He wrote the original Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries.
- Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3.
- PHP 3 was official launched in June 1998.
- Suraski and Gutmans rewrote the PHP 3′s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.
- On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.
- The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification.
- On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 introduced full featured object-oriented programming support. It was there in PHP 3 and PHP 4 but only the basic features.
- PHP is free software released under the PHP License, which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) due to restrictions on the use of the term PHP.
- PHP was originally designed to create dynamic and more interactive web pages. It is the most widely-used, open-source and general-purpose scripting language.
- It is possible to use PHP in almost every operating system. PHP can be used in all major operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and RISC OS.
- PHP uses procedural programming or object oriented programming and also a mixture of them.
- PHP is installed on over 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.
- 75% of Web 2.0 sites are built in PHP.
- There are about 5 million PHP developers worldwide.
- The latest release of PHP till now is 5.3.0. It was released on Jun 30, 2009. PHP 6 is under development alongside PHP 5. Major changes include the removal of register_globals, magic quotes, and safe mode. The reason for the removals was that register_globals had given way to security holes, and magic quotes had an unpredictable nature, and was best avoided.
- Some of the biggest online brands, such as Facebook, ProProfs, Digg, Friendster, Flickr, Technorati, and Yahoo! are powered by PHP.
Source: wikipedia
So, how is your score? Feeling surprised? 
I felt it too 
. Take this poll below and submit your score.
By the way, do you know more interesting facts? Post in comments and share with us.
The best thing I like about PHP whcih is, a very good and vast support for ARRAY’s.
Really great post
BTW my score was 14/20! Hats off to you for this post 
Great score Smoy. I got below 10
Nice post Sachin.. I still remember programming CGI that the article mentions PHP grew out of. Its a fast changing world out there when it comes to programming languages. PHP has been around for long and only seems to be on its way up for now.
“PHP uses procedural programming or object oriented programming. It is only programming language which can have mixture of both procedural and object oriented programming.”
WHAT?
How about C/C++, Ruby, Lua, Python, …?
There goes your credibility.
I’d love to know what your definitions of “procedural programming” or “object oriented programming”.
Also, please cite the sources of your numbers.
Hi Zecc, Thanks for the correction. I have updated the point and added the source from where I got all these info.
Good job Sachin, its really nice work and great efforts from your side… As there are millions of PHP developers – out of them most of the developer are there who dont know about these 20 Interesting facts about PHP…
PHP developer must know these points….
Good Job keep it up…
Thanks
Raghav
Great Work Sachin. Keep it up
Are you kidding me? Great post? Whatever. What PHP developer NEEDS to know when PHP was first developed, or what it’s original name was? Get a grip. Interesting facts that PHP developers NEED to know are more things like this http://bit.ly/tAdIP not what sodding size Rasmus Lerdorf’s shoes are.
People like me, love to read about such facts. That is why I shared these info with my readers.
I think every programmer must have skill in PHP but it's too many rival if we look at based on opportunity. As a good PHP programmer, they must be learn other language like Ruby on Rails
great thing about php…i dont knw before…..
Thanks Avtar
nice ones…i ♥ this post
Really Interesting. At present, only asp.net can compete with PHP, no other platform that can take over PHP. I like PHP to develop ecommerce website and I believe, it's ranked faster into search engines than any other platforms. Facebook is a great example of PHP based portal.
I think every developer must have skill in PHP and other programming but its too mant competitors.As agood developer and programmer,they must be learn other language and paltform like
iPhone Application Developers