History of PHP

A 30-year story

Year	Milestone
1994	Rasmus Lerdorf writes "Personal Home Page" CGI scripts in C.
1995	PHP/FI 1.0 released — Forms Interpreter added.
1997	PHP/FI 2.0 — first widely used version.
1998	PHP 3 (Andi Gutmans + Zeev Suraski rewrite the parser, rename it to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor).
2000	PHP 4 — Zend Engine 1.0, real OOP support starts.
2004	PHP 5 — proper classes, exceptions, PDO.
2015	PHP 7 — major perf rewrite (2× faster), scalar type hints.
2020	PHP 8 — JIT compiler, named arguments, match expression, attributes.
2023	PHP 8.3 — typed class constants, readonly classes.

Knowing the timeline matters because old tutorials online may show pre-PHP-7 syntax (mysql_query(), no type hints) — modern PHP looks much closer to Python or JavaScript.

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