PHP is the workhorse of the web but not fashionable. Converting the world from PHP 5.0 to PHP 7 would save 15B kW hours annually and 7.5B kg less carbon dioxide emissions he said – forgetting perhaps that any unused cycles would soon be taken up by machine learning and AI algorithms. Such is the penetration of PHP, which Lerdorf said drives around 2 billion sites on 10 million physical machines, that improving efficiency in PHP 7 had a significant impact on global energy consumption. 'This is how we got PHP,' he said, 'a templating language with business logic features pushed into it.' The web's workhorse Lerdorf described a kind of battle with early web developers as PHP evolved, with the developers asking for more and more features while he tried to point them towards other languages for what they wanted to do. However nobody wanted to write C, said Lerdorf, and people 'wanted to do everything in the stupid little templating language I had written, all their business logic.' The Danish-Canadian programmer's original idea was that developers still wrote the bulk of their web application in C but 'just use PHP as the templating language.' wanted to do everything in the stupid little templating language I had written, all their business logic

I wanted a simple templating language that was built into the web server.' Perl was 'slightly better', Lerdorf opined, but 'you still had to write Perl code to spit out HTML.

Programming php rasmus lerdorf