PHP

PHP is a scripting language primarily focused on web development. It was created by programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993, and released in 1995. PHP was originally an acronym for Personal Home Page, but now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

The standard PHP interpreter is free software under the PHP License. PHP was been widely ported and can be used on many operating systems.

History

Early History (1993 to 1997)

PHP development began in 1993, when several CGI programs were written, which were used to maintain Rasmus Lerdorf's personal homepage. He called his program "Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter" (PHP/FI).

PHP/FI could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. Early PHP was never intended to be a full programming language, but it simply just grew organically. The fact that PHP was never originally designed led to inconsistent naming of functions and order of parameters.

PHP 3 and 4 (1998 to 2004)

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and created the base of PHP 3, also changing the name of the language to the recursive acronym "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". After the official launch of PHP 3 in June 1998, Suraski and Gutmans started a new rewrite of PHP's core, creating the Zend Engine. Additionally, they founded Zend Technologies. On May 2000, PHP 4.0, powered by Zend Engine, was released.

PHP 5 (2004 to 2006)

On July 1 2024, PHP 5.0 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine 2.0. PHP 5.0 changed the language significantly, adding object-oriented programming, iterators, and exceptions.

PHP 7 (2015 to 2019)

During 2014 and 2015, PHP 7.0 was being developed. The foundation of it was from a PHP branch originally called PHP next generation, written by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. By 2014, WordPress benchmarks showed an almost 100% increase in performance. Due to these significant changes, the new Zend Engine was called Zend Engine 3, succeeding Zend Engine 2.

PHP 7.0 introduced many changes, some which were not backward compatible, such as more consistent variable dereferencing, a more predictable foreach, and consistency of bitwise shifts. Several legacy features were removed, such as the legacy MySQL extension, ASP-style delimiters, and language="php" script tags. PHP 7.0 also changed PHP's type system significantly, introducing it to function return types, adding scalar types, iterable type, nullable types, and the void return type.

PHP 8 (2020-Present)

PHP 8.0 was released on November 2020, as a major version with breaking changes. One of the largest changes was the addition of a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which improved performance massively.

Example Code

The following is a "Hello, world" program written in PHP code.

<?php
echo "Hello World!";
?>

References

En Wikipedia Org. (2026). Php. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP. Retrieved August 7, 2026.