Happy 25th birthday PHP!

Exactly twenty five years ago today, on June 8th 1995, Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf posted a simple announcement in the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi usenet group announcing Personal Home Page Tools version 1.0.

The tools [..] allow you to implement a guestbook or any other
form that needs to write information and display it to users
later in about 2 minutes.

The tools are in the public domain distributed under the GNU
Public License. Yes, that means they are free!

Originally a simple scripting language, PHP made it easier for people to create their own website.

Since then, PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher has evolved hugely, with the Zend Engine seeing the light in PHP 4, much improved support for object-oriented programming being added in PHP 5, and huge performance improvements being gained with the rewritten engine in PHP 7.
By now, PHP is a fully featured programming language and developers are eagerly looking forward to the release of PHP 8, expected towards the end of this year.

At the time of writing, 78.9% [1] % of all websites world-wide run on PHP and that includes the 37.2% [2] of websites running WordPress.

The WordPress community owes a massive debt of gratitute to PHP, so please join me in thanking all the developers behind PHP and in wishing PHP a happy birthday and many happy returns!