10 years ago to this day, Rasmus Lerdorf made the first release of PHP. It was slow to take off as this graph shows, but when the sleeping tiger awoke … Kapow! I had dinner last night with Rasmus, and he’s still the sanguine man he always was. He pointed out that he’s never taken a job where he’s being paid to run the PHP project, which makes him a rare item in the world of programming language creators.
Ten years into PHP, Rasmus is still working at it. He’s been a fixture at conferences, recently even taking his son with him. He passionately supports the smaller grassroots conferences, so I’m glad he’s speaking at OSCON this year. Rasmus still hacks on PHP and is still as interesting and mellow as the day I met him. This bodes well for PHP–here’s to the next ten being as successful as the first. Congratulations!