Rasmus Lerdorf (b. 1968) is a Danish-Canadian programmer and software engineer best known as the original creator of PHP, one of the most widely used server-side scripting languages on the web. [1] First released in the mid-1990s as a small collection of tools for managing his personal website, PHP grew under Lerdorf's stewardship into a general-purpose language that today underpins a substantial portion of the world's websites and web applications. [2]
Early life and education
Rasmus Lerdorf was born on 22 November 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, on Disko Island in Greenland, then part of the Kingdom of Denmark. [1] His family later settled in Canada, where he attended King City Secondary School in Ontario. He went on to study at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 1993 with a degree in systems design engineering. [1]
The creation of PHP
In 1994 Lerdorf began writing a set of Common Gateway Interface programs in the C programming language to track visits to his online résumé and manage his personal web pages. He called the collection "Personal Home Page Tools," which he released publicly in 1995. [2] The tools were designed to simplify common web tasks such as processing form data and embedding dynamic content in HTML, and they quickly attracted other developers who extended them.
Lerdorf did not set out to design a programming language; the project evolved incrementally as its growing community of users requested new features. [2]
Growth and legacy
As PHP's capabilities expanded, other developers—most notably Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski—rewrote its core interpreter, and the language was renamed PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. [2] Lerdorf remained a contributor to the open-source project and became one of the most recognizable figures in web development, frequently speaking at conferences about web performance and PHP's pragmatic design philosophy. The language went on to form the technical foundation of widely used platforms such as WordPress and Wikipedia, as well as early versions of Facebook. [1]
Later career
Beyond PHP, Lerdorf has held infrastructure and platform engineering roles at a number of technology companies, including Yahoo!, Etsy, and the payments firm WePay. [1] Throughout his career he has continued to advocate for practical, performance-focused approaches to building software for the web.
