who invented the PHP language?

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a popular open-source programming language that is widely used for server-side web development. The language was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995.

Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, created PHP while working on his personal website. He initially developed a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts in the C programming language to track visitors to his website and display the number of visits. He named the collection of scripts "Personal Home Page Tools," or "PHP Tools."

Over time, Lerdorf added more functionality to the PHP Tools, such as the ability to read and write cookies, and he eventually released the source code for the tools to the public in 1995. The PHP Tools began to gain popularity among other web developers, who contributed to the development of the language by adding new features and fixing bugs.

In 1997, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, two developers from Israel, rewrote the core of the language to improve its performance and added support for the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm. This new version of PHP was called PHP 3.0, and it quickly gained popularity among web developers.

In the following years, the PHP development community continued to grow, and new versions of the language were released with new features and improvements. Today, PHP is one of the most widely used programming languages for web development, with an estimated 80% of websites using the language.

Rasmus Lerdorf continues to be involved with the PHP community, and he has served as a mentor to many developers and has spoken at conferences around the world. He also works as an infrastructure architect at Etsy, an e-commerce platform.

The PHP language has had a long and vibrant history, with many developers contributing to its development and evolution. Today, the language is supported by a large and active community of developers who continue to improve and extend the language with new features and tools. The PHP language has been widely adopted as one of the most popular scripting languages for web development, powering millions of web pages and applications on the internet.