PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

I guess you are lacking some context.

Back in the day, you could:

* Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version

* Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server

* Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive.

When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do with very few lines of code.

The worse part was to manually get the sources of the dependencies one by one, hit ./configure and make, so you can compile a php module for Apache

In those days Microsoft was pretty strong, everything used to be closed source and payed and that's why for people who understand what it was back then, this does not sound like the splashy announcements of today.

That's why every time you see Linus, Stallman or any person that was active in the open source movement, you should pay a beer to them. The world of technology owe a lot to them, specially the underdogs.

Someone from my dads office gave my some printed pages about ASP from MS. Until that time I was doing all my web dev in Perl (it was basically either that or c) with print "hello... et. After reading about ASP, I concocted my own miserable php-like thing in perl where you could put perl code in between to add logic. I tried to find the code (I have it somewhere in dropbox, I'm sure), but I remember I failed at doing it reliably with regexes, so I made a while(1) loop finding all open , escaping the html before and after, printing it and adding the code in between. It was only a handful of lines and worked really well; I wrote a lot of cgi for my clients with it.

But it was slow (even after adding cache) and it need quite a bit of setup and libraries (CPAN with my own layers to make it easier to use), so I was very happy when I discovered PHP 3 (I did not know it existed before that).

Good memories; deploying a site cheaply by scp/rsync the files.

Around this time, I tried to create stuff with the old Java J2EE. I found it too slow to compile and the language was too inflexible.

So, without a framework, I built my project in PHP and finished it in a week.

> You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done.

The implications of what this meant for security were very important too, but in a negative way. Instead of an application with a single or few small entry points (like CGI), you could just design your PHP app with a bunch of files spread across the exposed public directory structure, and for a long time this was the reigning paradigm for PHP.

This, combined with the extension controlling whether it was processed as a PHP script or a plain text file meant that anyone making a quick and dirty backup of a file they were changing that didn't consider this would often end up exposing files to the public they didn't intend (mv config.php config.php.bak).

Additionally, since most people were running on shared hosting platforms and PHP was usually run as the webserver user, and many applications were designed to be dropped entirely into a public web structure, any capability for writing locally (like allowing file uploads) often consisted of setting a directory world writable to drop files in. Even ignoring how often people screwed up setting permissions and set everything of theirs world writable, even when done correct this usually ended up being security through not-so-obscurity, since common apps had default locations they used more often than not (customizing that required more user interaction and knowledge to set up, which was against the ethos of "drop in and use" PHP heavily leaned on initially).

PHP's ease of use was the ease of use of Windows 95 compared to Windows NT or Windows 2000. Sure, things are easier when you don't have to care about users and permissions and security. But you need to bootstrap any success you have into fixing those problems ASAP.

PHP was always a victim of it's own success in this regard. The thing that made it easy to use for people was that it did away with a lot of the security concerns that were (barely) in place at that time, and the effects of that are what made it a nightmare for those managing it, and often at one point or another those using it as they were bitten by these problems.

I'm glad we've all moved on from that. PHP did a lot to make it easier for people to do stuff online, and that in itself is a good thing and a laudable achievement. I'm unsure if it was a net gain though. It's too complex for me to easily say it was one, nor that it was definitively a net loss.

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP yourself), ...

Great for prototyping, or just to encourage new programmers (as they can see results almost immediately).

Though PHP was essentially thrown together initially so had a massively inconsistent standard library, had some insanely unsafe defaults for a few major versions, and other issues that it is very valid to complain about. It was also closely associated with mysql which at the time played very fast and loose with data integrity (2008-02-31? - perfectly valid date to store! Foreign keys? Let the business layer worry about rules like that! Transactional integrity? Again, sort that elsewhere!) in the name of ease & claims of performance - the two shared bits of each others reputation.