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Rasmus Lerdorf

Danish programmer and creator of PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf (born on 22 November 1968) is a Danish-Canadian programmer. He created the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participated in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead (who later created blo.gs), Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski. He continues to contribute to the project.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Quotes

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  • PHP 8 is significantly better because it contains a lot less of my code.
  • I did not develop the PHP we know today. Dozens, if not hundreds of people, developed PHP. I was simply the first developer.
  • I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems.
  • I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.
  • PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?
  • I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers.
  • We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all.
  • There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming.
  • I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.
  • I do care about memory leaks but I still don't find programming enjoyable.
    • @rasmus (deleted), January 2010, in response to a tweet linking to this page.
  • 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.
  • For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)
  • I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems.
  • PHP is just a hammer. Nobody has ever gotten rich making hammers.

Attributed to Lerdorf

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  • If eval() is the answer, you're almost certainly asking the wrong question.
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