[Speaking to masters 4] PHP founder RasmusLerdorf Interview 1

Just now, after listening to translation 13, let's take a look. It's interesting. the following sections may be more exciting. For details about php6's support for utf16, php's performance expansion, and security issues. it seems that RasmusLerdorf is a real speaker. the translation is as follows :-----------------------------------------------------------------

I just finished the 1/3 translation. Let's take a look. It's interesting. the following sections may be more exciting. For details about php6's support for utf16, php's performance expansion, and security issues. it seems that Rasmus Lerdorf is a real speaker. the translation is as follows :-----------------------------------------------------------------

I just finished the 1/3 translation. Let's take a look. It's interesting. the following sections may be more exciting. For details about php6's support for utf16, php's performance expansion, and security issues. it seems that Rasmus Lerdorf is a real speaker.

Listen to the following translation:
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Leo Laporte: today we have a very important guest. In fact, I am so excited about his arrival. I use more of his code than anyone else.
Chris DiBona: It does.
Leo Laporte: Rasmus Lerdorf, author of php
Chris DiBona: Author and founder of php
Leo Laporte: This is a programming language and is a source of Internet power in many aspects.
Chris DiBona: Yes, so let's get started.
Leo Laporte: The Origins of php are a bit unusual for a programming language. Am I right? It was originally called the Personal Home Page.
Rasmus Lerdorf: Yes, it started eleven or two years ago. It was a tool on a personal homepage to help people manage their websites,

Leo Laporte: So it is not a language.
Rasmus Lerdorf: Yes, it is not. It is a tool. Although at the underlying layer it has a framework to build these tools, my initial idea is: as a tool, it should be interesting, they are released as some tools. When people started using these tools, they began to ask me if they could have other tools. I actually only have five to seven tools. They need more tools. I wrote some more and told them that the underlying implementation of these tools is not complicated. You can write them by yourself, but a few people accept my suggestions, but most people ask me to write them. I began to realize that writing these components on the home page is actually very interesting. It is also interesting to write some components for others. I also have a tool called Form Interpreter (FI) that I have introduced. I also joked with a name. Since there is TCP/IP, I have PHP/FI.
Leo Laporte: Haha
Rasmus Lerdorf: By the second php version, I switched my focus from those tool components to background technologies that focus more on implementing components. Those tools are still there, and they are really interesting, but they gradually fade out of the stage, just for demonstration as some small examples.
Chris DiBona: Where were you at that time? (When creating php)
Rasmus Lerdorf: I am in Toronto for consulting
Chris DiBona: Right?
Rasmus Lerdorf: I was working for nutec, a Brazilian company located in southern Brazil and engaged in Unix development, they need a person who understands the North American market in English, so they sent me to help them set up a U.S. branch, and finally I became a product manager and sales staff, I should not only do this in terms of technology. Later, the web gradually emerged. This has been around for years. It seems that the web is getting bigger and bigger.
Leo Laporte: We were still using Mosaic in and 94 years. Netscape was just released. It was really early in the Internet.
Rasmus Lerdorf: it is indeed very early
Leo Laporte: Did you write this interpreter for these small components?
Rasmus Lerdorf: Yes. It was originally for these tools. I call them tools. You can put them on the home page. Some people say that the first version of php is written in perl, which is incorrect. I did some research in this regard. The problem is that the perl background runs in cgi Mode, and cgi basically produces (fork) The second server process for processing.
Leo Laporte: Very Low Efficiency
Rasmus Lerdorf: It's really too slow. It goes back to. perl is a little less than the shell language, but if every access request generates a new process, it still completely occupies the server process. The ISP that stores my program does not like my program to occupy the whole server process. So I have to find a more lightweight method to execute my tool. The perl-based version quickly disappears, and I did not even release any separately perl Php versions before php was released. I wrote some code by myself. It cannot be called a language. It just extracts some tags from html and associates them with c code.
Leo Laporte: is it a module written for apache?
Rasmus Lerdorf: No, it was originally a patch for the NCSA Web server, and the apache server originated from the NCSA server.
Leo Laporte: that is, you have installed a patch for NCSA. Maybe this is the secret of PHP's success. It is embedded in html. When it is executed, the interpreter will say, oh, this is php. Let's call c to execute it.

Leo Laporte: PHP is really important. You can see that twit. TV is built on drupal, drupal is also written in Php, And the template engine is also written in Php. You can use a perl template, but it is more reasonable to use php.
Rasmus Lerdorf: in fact, you can implement many things in any language.
Leo Laporte: Yes
Rasmus Lerdorf: it is no longer so unique. Before Apache is released, a module called include
Chris DiBona: server side include
Rasmus Lerdorf: Yes, server side include should also be traced back to NCSA, their first concept. When apache came out, they provided APIs. People can start with apache and see the API and expand it to mod_php. From then on, php began to accelerate development.
Leo Laporte: How php works now
Rasmus Lerdorf: It looks the same and remains unchanged. You can work in several ways.
Chris DiBona: How does $ sign come from?
Rasmus Lerdorf: $ the symbol was originally designed to facilitate implementation. It is easier to implement the state machine. The variable names and function names are separated, and people are familiar with it. Perl is very powerful. 94, everyone was using perl in 95 years, and it is still in use. I am not planning to create a new, strange, and revolutionary programming language, but to build it based on what people already know.
Leo Laporte: This is very practical.
Rasmus Lerdorf: Yes, it's very practical. You need to understand what people expect. People like me have some background for using C, perl, awk, sed and may also know some Shell programming. What do they want to call? What is the language they want? This is the origin of php.
Leo Laporte: I don't want to say that, but for me, php is a very powerful language for website development. Although there are some strong competitors, php is very powerful.
Rasmus Lerdorf: It's hard to say
Leo Laporte: I rely on it all.
Rasmus Lerdorf: popularity is always accompanied by criticism
Leo Laporte: Haha
Rasmus Lerdorf: This is often interesting. It is indeed very powerful, although criticism continues and it is difficult to calm down. People constantly criticize Php on their blogs, and their blogs are written in Php.
Leo Laporte: Well, wordpress is written in Php, drupal is written in Php, and many things are written in php.
Chris DiBona: What does the PHP name represent?
Rasmus Lerdorf: PHP yes, well. Hypertext Preprocessor, the name is stupid, that is, Php. Zee v and Andi were added in years. They used php/fi and encountered some problems in deep nesting. They were computer-specialized and knew how to write the parser, unlike my implementation through the hack state machine, I think they will be surprised when they see my program.
Chris DiBona: Well, you can work.
Rasmus Lerdorf: They volunteered to do these jobs. At that time, I was a little tired. I felt like I was writing a program for half of the Internet. People didn't patch me to fix the program, but...
Leo Laporte: This is my program. Change the bug.
Rasmus Lerdorf: Yes. I changed the Bug and wrote a program to do this for me. I told them it was easy to implement this. If so, they said: Okay, this is the most troublesome. What about the remaining bugs?
Chris DiBona: fix the bug.
Rasmus Lerdorf: I was really depressed, and I was just hollowing out. At that time, I felt that I was about to die, or I had to hand it over to a bigger team.
Leo Laporte: Well, before we continue talking about it, I think this is a very interesting thing. I think this is not a rare situation in the open-source community. This kind of thing often happens. People are saying: "I can't manage this community. If I don't, it's crazy." chris, you must have experienced many such situations. Is this a problem for the open-source community?
Chris DiBona: Yes. Actually, I have discussed this issue with Rasmus. Every five months, someone has publicly stirred up such a problem in the community. "This is the end of open source, someone has left the open-source community ". As you know, it is normal that someone enters and leaves.
Leo Laporte: in fact, this happened recently in the Zend framework community.
Chris DiBona: Yes. Let's talk about it, Rasmus.
Rasmus Lerdorf: the Zend framework is a separate project. To be honest, I am not very clear. You have to ask them, and I am not clear about the reason.
Chris DiBona: in one aspect, this is actually nothing. I don't want to say so. For most communities, some people quietly leave.
Leo Laporte: for our users, we are sometimes not satisfied with what we get.
Rasmus Lerdorf: Until php 3, actually only I am working on it. When someone sends me a patch for php, I will write it again, because this is my product.
Leo Laporte: It seems that you are not good at transferring jobs.
Rasmus Lerdorf: I don't know the open-source theory either. At that time, there was nothing open-source, and I thought about it later. It wasn't long before I got a job at the University of Toronto to build a conversation access system. I think it may be 97 years. Oh, 96 years. Occasionally, I still receive some patches for php, some bugs I have never encountered, and I have encountered some difficulties, A guy in Japan sent me some patches, which were cool. Some friends in Japan helped me with consulting work, but they were not regular. A year later, I figured it out. I do need to encourage this contribution. People submit the patch and I cannot take over it and rewrite it myself. I should accept it and give up control. Give others the power to do what they want. For most open-source developers, this is very difficult. Even now, open-source projects are their children and they should control them, but for development, you should let go, you cannot impose too many restrictions on other contributors to do what they want to do.
Leo Laporte: It seems that we should be more radical as users.
Rasmus Lerdorf: It doesn't matter. You should be aware of this. Most of these are open-source developers at home. 90% of open-source developers do whatever they do. They put their children to bed and gave them two hours for the open-source project. Then they opened their e-mail program and found a lot of angry information. "There are bugs here, and there are bugs here, this bug makes millions of e-commerce operations impossible. "They can only say," Well, I have contributed two hours at night, this is indeed not something I should care too much about (your millions of E-commerce programs )". Therefore, people should give some respect to these open-source developers.
Leo Laporte: Open Source is so prosperous. I would like to say that you talents are the driving force behind the open source community. What we can do is to give you the respect you deserve.
Chris DiBona: Well, I found Rasmus's car a little dirty.
Leo Laporte: Well, I am willing to scrubbed his car for him. I owe him too much. I ran such a php program on the server, from the log tracking program to drupal.
Rasmus Lerdorf: You don't owe me anything, you don't owe me anything. Our php project now has 1100 developers
Chris DiBona: It seems that you have done a good job of transferring jobs.

(To be continued)