Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf (born 1968) is a Danish-Canadian programmer who created the PHP scripting language. He developed PHP in 1994 while maintaining his personal web pages; it began as a collection of CGI scripts called Personal Home Page Tools to track visitors to his site. The tools were later expanded and released publicly as PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter), and the name PHP came to stand for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

After the initial release, Lerdorf continued to contribute to PHP as it grew, with the core rewriting by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski leading to PHP 3 and subsequent major versions. He remained involved as a core contributor and maintainer, helping guide early development of the language.

Beyond PHP, Lerdorf has worked as a software developer and adviser, applying his expertise to open-source projects and technology companies. His work on PHP has had a lasting impact on web development, as PHP became a foundational technology for server-side scripting and dynamic websites.