iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

Today is the eve of PHP's 10 anniversary, could anyone had guessed that what started as a little Perl script would evolve into a scripting languages powering millions of sites all over the globe.

My 1st experience with PHP came around 1998, when the ISP I was using at the time was quite mortified by the load my Perl (CGI) scripts were causing on the server. Their suggestion was to switch to PHP, which supposedly offered performance and would help me not kill server, this was back in the day when PHP 3.0.X was king. As a programmer coming from a C background, PHP was a welcome break from Perl, a language seemingly designed for obfuscation. The thing that impressed me the most about PHP was the online manual, which rivaled many books in clarity and ease of use and a thriving community of users willing to share the knowledge about the language.

It was another 2 years before I made my 1st contribution to PHP in a form of the shmop extension that provided quick & simple interface to shared memory for PHP. Since then I've been slowly making contribution, eventually taking a very active role in the development of the language in the past two years. Now a days, I spend a fair bit of my free time developing extensions, coming up with new features and of course solving security & performance issues. For the last year in a half it has been my privelege to act as PHP 4.3 release manager, finally passing on this mantle to Derick Rethans who will be RMing PHP 4.4.

In comparison to all the programming languages I've had the pleasure of using PHP has been by far the most influential. For many years now PHP related projects have been my main source of revenue, whether through script development or development of custom modules. It was essential to the development of FUDforum, the fastest most secure bulletin software around, which now comprises vast majority of company’s business. It even helped me to travel the world and as a speaker at various PHP related conferences.

On the eve of this momentous occasion, I would to thank Rasmus for developing PHP and his continued efforts at improving it as well as on occasional good word about FUDforum. While without Rasmus PHP would not exist, its growth would not be possible to the hundreds of volunteers who continue to spend countless hours at improving the language, my sincere thanks for all your contributions. Let’s hope that for the next 10 years PHP continues to grow at even a faster pace.