What is a PHP? Or, more precisely, what’s PHP? PHP is a general-purpose programming language made for the web in the first place, built up from the C programming language. It was originally created by the Canadian-Danish programmer. PHP uses idiosyncratic HTML-like tags to contain its code. The PHP programming language is mostly used server-side, which means that it runs on a web server software, which is customarily going to serve HTML to the website visitors.
PHP initially stood for Personal Home Page, because that pretty thoroughly constrained the meaning and desirability of using the language for general use, the language now stands for the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
The start of latest PHP series (PHP 7) was marked with the major release of PHP 7.0.0 in the beginning of December 2015. Not undermining any release coming after that, but this release introduced extensive changes in the way php works! PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6 (the last version before PHP 7), significantly reduced memory usage, supports return and scalar type declarations and much more! A year later, PHP 7.1.0 was released with support for nullable types and return type. Another year, in the end of November 2017, PHP 7.2.0 was released, which supported object typehinting and abstract method overriding. And PHP 7.3.0, released in the beginning of December 2018, deprecated a ton of problematic and undocumented methods. The next major release of PHP 7.4.0 shall bring arrow functions, typed properties, a null coalescing assignment operator and an array spread operator.
PHP is Everywhere
PHP runs everywhere and is easy to get started with. That’s why a lot of popular software is written in PHP. WordPress, Joomla, MediaWiki run on a PHP server. By the way, Facebook was written in PHP as well!
No Lack of Frameworks
There are more PHP application frameworks than you can imagine: Symfony, CodeIgnitor, Zend, Laravel, Aura, CakePHP, Yii… Surely you can make a list of web frameworks of some length for for the commonly used web languages like JavaScript, but the net volume of sites running PHP is immense.
Hit Refresh Workflow
With PHP, when you make a change to a source file, all you need to do is hit refresh, and your changes are available. No compiling, no fiddling around with “hot reloads” or bouncing a server. This short result loop is a huge productivity boost when hammering out an application.
