Ten years ago today, Rasmus announced Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0. Today, numerous people contribute to PHP and to the nurturing of its community, but the project has never lost sight of Rasmus's original goal of solving the web problem. The popularity of the language is the best testament to its success.

My passion for the web dates back to 1994 when I started playing with HTML and HTTP, and I soon began developing CGIs in C. The process was tedious, but it was the easiest way for me to create a GUI application. By simply generating some HTML, I could have an application that looked nice and pretty.

I then discovered Perl, PHP, and ColdFusion (in that order), and PHP became my favorite. Due to market demand in the late 90s, however, I took a job writing ColdFusion (and C) after getting my degree. Three years later, I became a freelance PHP consultant, and I've been making a living with PHP ever since, most recently with the PHP consultancy that I started earlier this year.

So, thanks to Rasmus for getting things started, to Zeev and Andi for their early contributions, and to everyone else who continues to contribute to PHP - whether it's by contributing directly to the language, answering questions on mailing lists, or just writing interesting applications in PHP - you are what makes PHP what it is today. Thank you.

Other thoughts are being tracked here on del.icio.us.