Rasmus Lerdorf

thumb|Rasmus Lerdorf 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. Quotes PHP 8 is significantly better because it contains a lot less of my code. @rasmus, November 2020. I did not develop the PHP we know today. Dozens, if not hundreds of people, developed PHP. I was simply the first developer. sitepoint.com I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems. sitepoint.com I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code. Itconversations.com 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? sitepoint.com I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers. Itconversations.com, 2007, "PHP on Hormones" at MySQL conference. 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. Itconversations.com, 2007, ditto. There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming. Itconversations.com, 2007, ditto. 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. Itconversations.com, 2007, ditto. 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. Itconversations.com quoted in www.dasgenie.com 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 :) @rasmus, April 2010. I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems. @rasmus, November 2010. PHP is rarely the bottleneck. @"PHP Performance" Talk, July 29, 2010 in San Francisco Ugly problems often require ugly solutions. Solving an ugly problem in a pure manner is bloody hard. php.devel Mailing List, October 2002 PHP is just a hammer. Nobody has ever gotten rich making hammers. @rasmus, May 2014. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the function hashing mechanism was strlen(). php-internals mailing list, December 2013. Attributed to Lerdorf If eval() is the answer, you're almost certainly asking the wrong question. PHP.net: eval, Anonymous comment, 2004 PHP in a Nutshell by Paul Hudson, 2005 External links Category:People from Greenland Category:Programmers from Denmark Category:1968 births Category:Living people