Interesting Facts About PHP Every Developer Should Know!

PHP was first developed in 1994 by Danish Canadian Programmer named Rasmus Lerdorf. Although the most interesting fact was PHP originally designed to exchange a set of Perl scripts to handle and maintain Rasmus Lerdof's Personal Home Pages. But now it is officially known as 'Hypertext Preprocessor'. It is famously known for it's server side scripting and general purpose programming. Recently PHP launched it's stable version in April 12, 2017 after more than 20 years of its release.

If you ask any PHP Programmers, they will tell you what they already know about PHP and have the basic knowledge of this language. But there are some Interesting facts about PHP that haven’t been revealed to most developers. Here are the lesser known facts about PHP:

1. It Was Not Developed to Be a Programming Language

The main intention of Lerdorf to develop PHP was to manage and handle his own personal website. His main aim was to create a Common Gateway Interface to work with web forms in his website.

2. Initially, PHP’s Acronym was not Hypertext Preprocessor
Yes, you read it correct When PHP was developed, it was an acronym for Personal Home Page. It was initially known as PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter.

3. Purpose to Develop PHP evolved
It was originally used to build simple, yet dynamic web applications and to communicate with databases. It also helped in finding bugs, reporting and improving the codes. Slowly and gradually the meaning of PHP, evolved.

4. PHP had consist modification to develop as Programming language

In 1997, PHP officially became “Hypertext Preprocessor”. The two experienced PHP Coder, Zee Suraski and Andi Gutmans updated the original software component creating the base for PHP 3 which officially released in June 1998.

5. The PHP Core Was Rewritten and Supported by Zend Engine
The core PHP was again drafted by Suraski and Gutmans. Zend Engine was developed in 1999. The modified and updated PHP was then launched in May 2000, powered by Zend Engine 1.0. PHP 4 continued to develop until the version 4.4.9.

6. There Are More Than 5 Million PHP Developers
Although the exact number of PHP Developers, in the world is not clear. Even so, Zend recently predicted that there are more than 5 million PHP Developers working extensively in PHP Development Company all over the world.

7. PHP is Not Available under the General Public Licenses
PHP is certainly available for free, however there are a few limitations. It keeps them from being dispersed under the General public license. For instance, if the product is made particularly from PHP, it will require consent from the PHP groups to contain PHP in their names..

8. More Than 250 Million Websites Use PHP in their Websites
According to survey in 2017, there are 250 million websites, approximately, that are running PHP in their websites. This number must have grown since 2017, which suggests that, right now, there are more than 250 million websites that use PHP for Programming.

9. PHP 7  Next Generation Release
With the release of PHP 7.2.9 , PHP is prepared for the next generation level. The execution of PHP was enhanced through refactoring, which was at first named as PHP Next Generation (phone). It was written by Xinchen Hui, Nikita Popov, and Dmitry Stogov.

10. Big Brands and Popular Sites Use PHP
The biggest online brands, for example, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo etc. are altogether supported by PHP. Famous websites like Wikipedia.org, WordPress.org, Weibo.com, Twitter.com, etc, are utilizing PHP.

Since so many years, PHP has created and progressed toward becoming what it is today. The language has developed to address the issues of developers and admin effectively. This evolution clarifies why PHP is so significant in the business of PHP Development.

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