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WHO IS RASMUS LERDORF
Rasmus Lerdorf was born on 22 November 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, a tiny town (only 1100 citizens) on Disko island, Greenland. He moved with his family to Canada in the 80s, in 1993 he graduated with honors from the University of Waterloo in Applied Sciences in System Design Engineering. His successes include the addition of the LIMIT clause to the MySQL DBMS and a contribution to the Apache HTTP Server.
In the decade following graduation, while writing the the PHP programming language, Rasmus changed several jobs and moved to different states, gathering experience in the IT sectors of numerous companies, until he settled in California, where still lives. In 2002 he started working for Yahoo! Inc. as Infrastructure Architecture Engineer, a role he held for 7 years. Successively, after a short period at WePay where he developed API, in 2013 Rasmus started working for Etsy, the hugely popular craft trade site, as Distinguished Engineer and still works there today.
Currently, very often Rasmus takes part in conferences as a tireless speaker, always affable and ready to answer questions from his listeners, and undoubtedly very prepared. Noteworthy is one of his speech at the Open Source CMS Summit, in 2007, when he proved a security breach in all the projects that had been presented during the conference.
PROBLEM SOLVING
Rasmus Lerdorf approach to the world of programming is simple and effective: “problem solving”. The creation of PHP is a clear demonstration of this philosophy, as Rasmus has repeated several times: “I did not create PHP because I wanted to write a new language. But to solve a problem. What I'm passionate about is solving things. Programming bores me. I am an engineer who loves to use tools and when there is not one that I need, I create it. Today I have no need to create a new language. "
A good example to understand to what extent Rasmus is a passionate problem solver is a funny story dating back to a moment in Lerdorf pre-PHP life, during his internship at Nortel Telecom in Toronto, which seems to have had a strong influence on the way he designed PHP. Rasmus says that, due to a bug that no one was able to fix, despite spending years looking for it, about every two months the company's callrouting system dropped every single call from its queue. So they asked the then very young Lerdorf to investigate, without really thinking that he could have solved it, but rather considering it as a method for learning and knowing in depth the functioning of the system.
Lerdorf took up the challenge and started printing each line of the source code, taped it to the walls of the hallways tracing the flow and trying to debug it manually. After three and a half months, Rasmus finally found the mistake, which turned out to be a collision of the global variable. “Two separate pieces of the code, completely unrelated, had the same name for a variable. And the latter was global: therefore, changing it in one place at exactly the wrong time, it caused the former code to go crazy. And the C compiler at the time had no way of informing us what was happening…”
HOW PHP WAS BORN
PHP was born in 1994, just a year after Rasmus graduated: “When I started writing PHP, I had no idea how a programming language was written. So what did I do? I went on in logical steps, gradually adding one piece of the puzzle to another”. And again, “I've always thought of PHP as a concrete solution to use, like a toothbrush. You use it every day, it does its job, it's a simple tool. Likewise, I conceived PHP. "
At the time of the official launch on the market in 1995, the acronym "PHP" stood for Personal Home Page and the code was identified as a "Hypertext Preprocessor". PHP was initially written in C as a set of CGI, the acronym of "Common Gateway Interface".
The original purpose of PHP was to give the possibility to create dynamic and more interactive web pages, and it is no coincidence that its creation occurred with the years of the Internet boom! The idea of ??Rasmus was quite simple and clear: to find a quick and easy alternative to C and Perl, whose writing was too slow for the rhythms that the diffusion of the Internet was imposing. Therefore, Rasmus created a language that could be used as a template, in which to embed snippets capable of showing the function outputs or values ??saved in variables, while the rest of the server-side business logic could easily continue to be implemented in separate CGIs.
The three and a half months spent manually debugging the Nortel Telecom code were an important lesson for Rasmus, especially when adding variables and scopes in PHP. In fact, from this event, Rasmus understood that, while going global in PHP, it is fundamental “to declare damn well the fact, inside the method or a function", in order to prevent an accidental passage.
Often, when Lerdorf attends conferences or summits on PHP reiterates a series of important concepts to understand how PHP works and programming in general; among these, there are two particularly important life lessons:
1. BUILD AN ECOSYSTEM
During the PHP conception phase, the most important thing for Ramus was not to obtain a 100% syntactically correct language, but to achieve an ecosystem as comprehensive and suitable as possible within which to positioned this language. In fact, in this way, it ensured the proper functioning on most of the shared hosting environments and its integration within the existing web servers and database systems.
2. THE CODE IS MADE FOR YOURSELF
Rasmus's approach to programming, or “problem solving”, applies to everyone: language development team, as well as independent developers, always try to find new solutions to problems that cause difficulties for them, and not to the community: this is why it is important to identify the single problem before we can hope for a solution.
HOW MUCH AND HOW HAS PHP SPREAD?
From the outset, Rasmus was convinced that the maximum duration of PHP would be six months, perhaps a year. And every six months he found himself surprised that PHP was still in use and that no one else had thought of writing a more effective language. Well, we can safely say that Rasmus was very wrong, considering that in 2020 PHP programming language is still running and turning 25!
To date, PHP is the most widely used generic and open-source scripting language in the world, used by almost 80% of all websites on the Internet. Thanks to a script, the code can query databases, create images, read and write files and communicate with remote servers.
PHP can be used with all major operating systems, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and RISC OS. In addition, PHP developers are well aware of the security threats on the network and have implemented the mandatory login function with a username and password in order to access the site. PHP is powered by the open-source Zend Engine platform, and can be incorporated directly into HTML or used in content management systems (CMS) or web frameworks.
So far, it is unclear how many PHP developers are in the world, although Zend recently estimated that the number is around 5 million. According to Netcraft's Web Server Survey, in January 2013, around 244 million websites used PHP, and despite the creation of new tools and languages, PHP is still used in the vast majority of websites.
The PHP mascot is a large blue elephant called "elePHPant".
A RECOMMENDATION FROM THE FATHER OF PHP
One of the recommendations that Rasmus seems to make at every conference and to each of its collaborators is to “not lose sight of what you are planning, and why you are doing it. We are planning to solve a problem. And hopefully it's a problem that actually has a meaning. So work on things that have meaning for you, please. "
Eventually, it seems that the only requirement that Lerdorf imposes on his future colleagues is a knowledge of the functioning of C, since C is essentially the milestone of what exists online. In fact, Rasmus says he is a little "skeptical" of anyone who declare programmer without a good knowledge of C.
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