PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Leaves Yahoo

PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf has left his long-held position at Yahoo, according to his Twitter account. Lerdorf joined Yahoo in 2002 and has worked for the company as an engineer since. Lerdorf is most notable for creating the original PHP engine, and for being a notable open source developer, speaker and author. Lerdorf developed PHP in 1995 after building up a collection of C macros that he was using in web application development. The original meaning of the acronym is ‘Personal HomePage’, and the language and environment are still the most popular in use on the web today.

PHP was developed further and commercialized by Zend, but Lerdorf has maintained an ongoing involvement with the open source project. Lerdorf has worked at a number of companies since first developing PHP, but has spent a large part of his professional career with Yahoo and he had a strong association with the company. Lerdorf is one of a number of star engineers and developers who have left Yahoo in recent times, and the stable of notable and high-profile engineers at the company has whittled out.

Lerdorf has been more recently noted for his blog posts, such as his outline on his philosophy to developing PHP applications: The no-framework PHP framework.