PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

2 hours ago by alberth

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s.

You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server.

I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP.

2 hours ago by dspillett

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP yourself), ...

Great for prototyping, or just to encourage new programmers (as they can see results almost immediately).

Though PHP was essentially thrown together initially so had a massively inconsistent standard library, had some insanely unsafe defaults for a few major versions, and other issues that it is very valid to complain about. It was also closely associated with mysql which at the time played very fast and loose with data integrity (2008-02-31? - perfectly valid date to store! Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about rules like that! Transactional integrity? Again, sort that elsewhere!) in the name of ease & claims of performance - the two shared bits of each others reputation.

a minute ago by marianov

It also launched many information security careers :)

31 minutes ago by Cullinet

If someone proposed a conspiracy theory for why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct in reaction to plotting by corporate interests in perpetuating the value of consulting services and the high salaries of CS graduates, I would buy the hardback edition immediately. VB, Visual Age, Delhi, Genera on Tru64, RDB and RMS and DEC TM giving you schema less (noSQL to taste) wan -clustered ACID time series transactions programmable in BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN C and DCL on any two of three architectures (VAX, Alpha and Itanium - currently available for running unchanged on x64 VMs) and the OS/2 subsystem bundled (plus the first free beer transaction manager NT provided working with CICS, a feature that I truly believed was capable of giving Microsoft the corporate game by itself) which provided a VBA front end to legacy systems alongside local OS/2 tools running atop the kernel thru W2K.. the day I in place upgraded my overloaded think pad in a hotel room in Köln, and I realised when Slashdot loaded in Netscape 7 that Microsoft couldn't get any respect for anything even as impressive as W2K truly was –

Edit : large part cut for brevity

I really should have composed what I just said, much better than I have done -/so I have cut the bulk from my first too enthusiastic version / I mean to describe how much you can get running with just BASIC language skills and, at least atop of VMS, and buying the right licenses, that answer is "anything almost anything that you can imagine from a power station to a stock exchange ". Stack Overflow and POF running tiny amounts of hardware under Windows Server aren't rare cases of the potential for leveraging commercial tools. If VMS is more palatable than Windows (and certainly I will not compare the two for TCO) and the Intel architecture pricing for RDB holds up I totally believe that SAAS on VMS can be a viable alternative platform capable of making a minor industry of positions for the experienced programming talent for whom ageing has become a invisible barrier to retirement or even employment and if that's possible, then there's right there the environment wherein a generation of younger engineering minds can both take respite from rat race technology change and learn from direct experience to write the reliable systems for replacing what I fear is a current batch of the most fragile infrastructure building in modern history.

edit : incidentally, I think the entry level salaries the FAANG group is paying is a coincidentally perfect match for the price for a consultant from IBM or whoever and I don't think this is a accident by any means, only it didn't seem to work out how the old big firms would have wanted things..

edit, again, mea - my conspiracy being IBM et.al killed the good development tools in hope for being able to bill for consultation only they didn't count on the ability for big tech competitors to dismantle entirely other industries to feed paying salaries at the level of consulting rates and monopolizing the talent in that way.

2 hours ago by sam_lowry_

>Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about rules like that!

Rails made this approach viable at the time.

an hour ago by showerst

> Rails made this approach viable at the time.

Rails didn't get big until 2006, eight years later than this time period =).

an hour ago by bouncycastle

It was just a massive toolbox that had everything - session, templates, large bundles of familiar libraries, Apache module.

By far, the most useful tool in the box was probably MySQL. Before then, you had to work with flat files.

Oh, and "magic quotes" was a bad idea ;-)

2 hours ago by Seattle3503

> I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP.

With PHP you can just start typing in your file and produce output. Even with lightweight frameworks like Flask there is boilerplate.

2 hours ago by 101008

Definitely. I started with PHP when I was only 12 or 13 years old. Adding some logic inside your .html files (mostly includes, that were like magic back then[1]), renaming to .php and upload them to the server using FTP was so simple. A few years later, when I had to set up a lot of things to run Django I was surprised at how hard it was.

PHP was simple to use, and to understand its logic, because it was embeded into HTML itself if you want to. No need to write views, controllers, templates, anything. And most of the shared hosting (paid and free) supported it.

[1]Includes were like magic back then because if you had a heavy content website with a lot of inner pages (fansites), updating the navigation sidebar was a pain in the ass. Originally they were made with framesets, later iframes (with no borders, but if the content changed, a scrollbar appeared). When I (and my friends) started to use PHP and be able to use includes, it was awesome.

(Edited to fix formatting)

2 hours ago by iammiles

This is the same story for me. Moving from PHP to Python was really difficult conceptually for me. For years fiddling with Apache configs and uploading files via FTP was web development.

I sometimes find myself thinking about teenagers getting started nowadays and the accessibility of development, but I suppose there are a lot more resources now than the early 2000s for some enterprising kids to get started.

an hour ago by cronix

Yes, but at the same time, web development was a much simpler process back then to get into and actually start to learn. No virtual machines to have to learn, or npm, or git, or... just code in php/html in notepad and maybe some raw basic javascript until js frameworks started becoming a thing and upload it via ftp. I mean, you didn't even have css to worry about...you just threw everything into a table! (lol!) There were only a few standard screen resolutions you had to worry about, and only desktops/laptops that were always oriented in the same position (landscape). I'm not saying it wasn't crude, but it was a lot faster to go from knowing 0 to building a dynamic web page with a real visitor counter vs everything extra you have to consider using modern devices and tooling.

39 minutes ago by bsharitt

Starting with PHP and Visual Basic got me on the way to making cool stuff really fast, but I think they both made the leap to "real" programing languages later. With web development, I didn't really move on from PHP's "HTML with extra stuff" until I came across Ruby on Rails, and I'm not sure I ever really got past VB for high level GUI desktop stuff, but I was able to get into some lower level C in high school, but I've never really done desktop GUI programming since other than a little bit of Cocoa/Objective-C with earlier version of Mac OS X.

5 minutes ago by superasn

PHP is proof how little the core web technologies change over the years, even though so many new technologies have come after it.

Looking at this page I beleive I can still make a pretty decent website backend using vanilla php (including authentication) and a nice front end using plain old html and javascript from so many years ago.

15 minutes ago by aeontech

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.

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.

2 hours ago by simonw

"PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor was chosen as the official meaning of the PHP acronym with 53% of the votes."

For anyone curious I tallied the votes from the linked page:

    57 PHP HTML Preprocessor
    29 PHP Hypermedia Preprocessor
    98 PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

an hour ago by n0mad01

i guess "Personal Home Page" didnt sound sophisticated enough.

38 minutes ago by fomine3

Professional Home Page instead

2 hours ago by bigyikes

I haven’t used PHP in years, but Laravel was such a fun and productive framework to work in. It really has a way of making you feel like a “code artisan”, something I typically only hear coming from Rails developers. In contrast, every Node app I’ve worked on has felt somewhat amateur, even if the code was high quality.

7 minutes ago by VWWHFSfQ

I've developed very large apps in PHP (Cake), Rails, Django, and Node.js (Express). If I had to rank my preference for how easy/nice/productive I was in each of them:

1) Django

2) Rails

3) Cake

... BIG GAP ...

4) Node.js (Express)

2 hours ago by canadianfella

Laravel only came out 10 years ago. It’s not old.

an hour ago by anon776

PHP 7.x and Laravel really gave the language its big boy pants. Really fun to develop in and looks nothing like the PHP 3.x and 5.x grime.

an hour ago by JakeStone

PHP was a godsend, saving me from Perl. I switched to the Dark Side and prefer C# these days, but I still keep an eye on it just because there was some fun stuff I built with it.

Looking at that archived page brings back memories. Since I'd started with PHP/FI and I think I went on until 4.x, I'm pretty sure I saw that announcement when it actually came out.

3 hours ago by habibur

Nostalgia. I started with PHP/FI 2.x. Was a great relief from writing web server apps in C.