Re:Ask HN: Where is the Django community?
by KnightWhoSaysNi on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @11:15AM
(#2781256)
First of all, how it started isn't as important as where it is now. And what we have now is a full-fledged programming language. Secondly, if you can build large-scale maintainable websites with PHP, who cares how the language got started originally. It's all about what you can do with the language - and in that regard PHP is a great tool (although certainly not the only tool available).
"I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way." -- Rasmussen Lerdorf, inventor of PHP
But to your point, he also said: "I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems."
Look at how it started, as personal home page template processing scripts in Perl, and you'll see it started with much more in common with a templating tool or web framework than with a formal language.
"PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications..."
"PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax."
http://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php