Rasmus Lerdorf
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Created PHP
- Nationality
- Greenlandic-Canadian
Wrote a few CGI scripts to count visitors to his own CV — and accidentally produced the web's most used server language.
The tools were called Personal Home Page Tools and were released in 1995. Lerdorf has been unusually open about never having intended to design a programming language: functions were added as he or others needed them, which explains the frequently noted inconsistency in the standard library's naming and argument order.
Other developers took the language over from version 3 onwards, but the low barrier to entry remained — you could mix HTML and code in one file and upload it to any web host. That is still why a substantial share of the web, led by WordPress, runs on PHP.