PHP Version History: Brief Timeline of World’s Most Used Back-end Language

PHP Version History: Brief Timeline of World’s Most Used Back-end Language

Through the years, PHP is the premium choice of developers for developing web applications. The core reason behind its usage is its ease in structure. The language is quite easy to understand, even a newbie developer can get up and learn it in no time.

Today, PHP is the most commonly used language for developing web applications. It powers over 52,000,000+ websites  on the internet, that’s approximately comes down to a whopping 82% of the websites. This single statistic is enough to augment the superiority of PHP language. There are numerous PHP frameworks available including – but not limited to – Laravel, Codeigniter, Symfony and others, thus making the PHP community the most authentic and the leading one in application development sphere.

Thanks to Rasmus Lerdorf, who back in 1994, conceived the idea of PHP. Working through it, he later made its first ever version public in 1995 known as PHP/FI. At that time, it was just a simple PERL/CGI script toolset written in C language. The language evolved quickly after the release of PHP3 in 1998, which included several advanced features – most importantly – the introduction of Zend engine.

Today, PHP has found its usage in many leading organizations for handling their online portfolio. These big guns include Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, WordPress and others, while the numbers are still growing.

Here’s a brief look on PHP versions history, as how it emerged as one of the world’s most used programming language through the years.