20th Anniversary of my relationship with PHP

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2023-02-25 (updated on 2024-03-08)
2023 marks the 20th anniversary of my relationship with PHP, the programming language that changed my life. And I have to confess that I'm still in love.
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I remember that at that time I was very excited about the new C#, I had been using it for desktop applications, and I had been surprised by the way to create websites with Visual Studio .NET, but a colleague encouraged me to try PHP... and until now.

PHP version 4.2 was running then, so yes, shortly after I was caught by the jump to PHP 5, and that's where I delved deeper, thanks to the excellent book The PHP 5 Bible, written by John Coggeshall and edited by Anaya Multimedia. It expanded my knowledge, helped me become an expert in migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5, and gave me a more strategic view of web development.

I remember spending many nights thinking about the architecture of a generic content management system, and so it arose Internia CMS, something that some websites still work with today. Later I would create a really simple system for websites, something that gave way to the current Simple Web PHP, the simple and powerful CMS.

Since PHP 6 didn't come to fruition, I lived a lot with branch 5, which evolved quite a bit. Then, the challenge of migrating from PHP 5 to PHP 7 was something of a jump from 4 to 5, and porting old PHP applications to work under PHP 7 is one of my specialties, which could be framed within what is reverse engineering. And now it's PHP 8 time!

I understand programmers who don't marry any language, but, on the other hand, specializing is precisely what allows you to get the most out of it. That would be the side of the coin. In my case, I first got hooked on it, quickly, because I really liked it, then I think I've simply let myself go where the work wanted to take me.

Witnesses to this relationship have been the Zend Framework, NetBeans, and now Visual Studio Code environments.

Of course, I'm not just a programmer, and not only I know program in PHP. In this realm, you are not only compelled to try other things, but often enticed to do so. Maintaining that curiosity is great!