What Drives the Creator of PHP? Rasmus Lerdorf’s Journey and Insights

Introductory Quote

“The ‘father of PHP’, Rasmus Lerdorf, is straightforward and pragmatic, speaking concisely with a spirit of ‘practicality above all’.”

Lerdorf Introduction

Rasmus Lerdorf created the PHP project in 1995, earning the title “father of PHP”. He has also contributed to other open‑source projects, worked as an architect at Yahoo, and later joined the payment startup WePay to develop APIs.

Lerdorf was born in 1968 on Disko Island, Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada, and holds a degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

To maintain his personal website he wrote CGI tools in C, which later evolved into PHP/FI, a set of scripts that displayed his résumé and web‑traffic statistics and could connect to databases to generate dynamic pages.

Since 1985 he has been involved in Unix system solutions. He is known for introducing the LIMIT clause in mSQL, a feature later adopted by MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Lerdorf prefers to be seen as a problem‑solving technical expert rather than a programmer, and he always writes code himself when needed. He now lives near San Francisco with his wife Christine.

PHP has become one of the most popular languages, thanks to its three founders: Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski, and Andi Gutmans.

In 1994 Lerdorf designed PHP 1.0, released it to the open‑source community in 1995, followed by PHP 2 in 1996. In 1998 Suraski and Gutmans rewrote the parser, creating PHP 3.0, and later founded Zend. Subsequent major releases include PHP 4, PHP 5, and the current PHP 7.

Although he created PHP, Lerdorf never pursued entrepreneurship; instead he joined companies to continue his passion and travels the world as a PHP evangelist.

Work Focus

I work on projects that directly affect users. After years at Yahoo building infrastructure for billions of endpoints, I now at Etsy manage backend infrastructure serving millions of users. Technology is a tool; the real excitement comes from improving millions of lives.

“Problem” as Guidance

I prefer the title “engineer” over “computer scientist” because engineers focus on solving immediate problems. I built PHP not out of love for programming but because existing tools in 1993 couldn’t solve web problems efficiently.

Experience and Lessons

I have made many mistakes, but also achieved results beyond expectations. The key lesson is to consider the entire ecosystem when solving web problems; over the past 20 years, solutions have proliferated, yet few provide a complete, high‑quality ecosystem.

What’s Hardest About PHP 7?

The final 10 % of PHP 7 development was the most time‑consuming and least enjoyable, though new features and performance gains kept morale high. Each release brings endless testing, platform issues, edge‑case investigations, and bug reports.

Onboarding New Contributors

While version‑control systems like Git are popular, good documentation and an easy contribution workflow matter more for attracting and retaining contributors.

If I Could Redesign PHP

I would make keyword case‑sensitivity optional; early PHP treated template tags case‑insensitively, a decision that persists today.

Is JavaScript Swallowing Other Languages?

PHP and JavaScript have evolved in parallel. JavaScript dominates the client side, while PHP remains strong on the server. Both are tools; the choice depends on the problem at hand.

Programming Principles

Release code that is effective, secure, and fast, then move on to solve the next problem; neglecting any of these aspects forces you to revisit the code.

Future Outlook

I care less about the future of programming languages than whether they can solve current problems. For example, Etsy’s infrastructure should bridge wealthy buyers and struggling artisans, and our solutions should eliminate customers’ problems instantly.

Even today I still dislike programming for its own sake; I remain focused on problem‑solving.