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(OT) Revisionist History Lesson

by Anonymous Monk
on Aug 20, 2019 at 11:25 UTC ( [id://11104721]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

15 Dec 2001
http://svn.php.net/viewvc/phpdoc/en/trunk/appendices/history.xml?r1=64852&r2=65199&pathrev=314121

PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts

05 Aug 2011
https://web.archive.org/web/20110807085055/http://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

PHP as it's known today is actually the successor to a product named PHP/FI. Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, the very first incarnation of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language.

20 Jul 2012
https://twitter.com/rasmus/status/226405807305138176

"I wonder why people keep writing that PHP was ever written in Perl. It never was."

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Re: (OT) Revisionist History Lesson
by jdporter (Paladin) on Aug 20, 2019 at 14:50 UTC

    I agree with the OP. Some of us were around back then, and remember things differently from how they're now told in the PHP world. PHP originally stood for "Perl Home Pages". Apparently the PHP folks feel the need to disavow the connection to Perl, even historically. Which is especially stupid considering that, in the lineage of computer languages, PHP has no predecessor more obvious than Perl.

      The contemporaneous mod_perl or Mason mailing lists might be interesting places to mine for information; I vaguely recall scuttlebutt from back then along the lines that PHP was rewritten in C because "they" thought you couldn't embed perl in HTML (a la Mason).

      The cake is a lie.
      The cake is a lie.
      The cake is a lie.

Re: (OT) Revisionist History Lesson
by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 20, 2019 at 11:29 UTC

    Maybe if you read the lines you quote closely, you will realize that the interpretation is correct:

    PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple se +t of Perl scripts.

    So, "PHP" proper is different from PHP/FI.

    Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, the very first incarnation of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language.

    So, PHP was written in C.

    What is the point of your post?

      What is the point of your post?

      Debunking Revisionist History:

      PHP began life as a simple little cgi wrapper written in Perl.
      https://www.php.net/manual/phpfi2.php
      
      I wonder why people keep writing that PHP was ever written in Perl. It never was.
      https//twitter.com/rasmus/status/226405807305138176
      

        Obviously to Rasmus, PHP/FI is different from PHP.

        Also, I think even if PHP was once written in Perl, whether its primary author considers it to be that way or not has very little bearing on Perl nowadays. Maybe you want to take this discussion elsewhere. Maybe there is a history website where you can record such things to your taste.

Re: (OT) Revisionist History Lesson
by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Aug 25, 2019 at 11:18 UTC

    May be the world would have been a better place without any release of PHP. See also.

    «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

    perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'Help

Re: (OT) Revisionist History Lesson
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 21, 2019 at 00:05 UTC

      That section appears to have undergone a number of changes over the years but this one on the 8th of September 2004 is an early one. However, this was swiftly re-edited later that same day to read

      PHP was originally designed as a small set of Perl scripts, followed by a rewritten set of CGI binaries written in C by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994

      So it seems there has been confusion among PHPers for quite some time as to their origin.

Re: (OT) Revisionist History Lesson
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 22, 2019 at 21:21 UTC
    Perl could have prevented this mess by 1) bundling a tweaked mod_perl and 2) adding more core modules; because on the original wiki CPAN was selling point #1 AGAINST Perl (after 3 kudos):
    "PHP, unlike ASP and Perl, has some of the largest free and open-source libaries included with the core build."
    
    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PHP&oldid=1255359#PHP%27s_Libraries
    

      Deployment—plus apps to deploy—was indeed the main reason PHP got ahead. But there were other reasons, largely cultural in my view, and hindsight being 20/20 the issues could have been addressed a few different ways; modperl lite was not—directly anyway—one of them. And the rest… I can't speak to today but 20ish years ago, those core libraries were garbage, some without even tests or any kind of error feedback or debugging at all. And that wiki section is written quite disingenuously, manipulatively. In one breath: Perl doesn't have this stuff included! PHP has stuff like replace! and match! The downlow boasting about the raft of s/key_words/keywordz/ it has is embarrassing. I was shocked when I did a contract that involved a bunch of PHP and had to debug things and saw how bad the included libraries were compared to stuff I was used to like DBI.

      Anyway… PHP is still more fun than Java. :P

        PHP is still more fun than Java. :P

        Yes; but you need to try Scala, if you haven't yet.

        I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
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