Rasmus Lerdorf
Early life and education
Rasmus Lerdorf (born 22 November 1968) is a Greenlandic-Danish computer programmer best known as the creator of the PHP scripting language. He was born in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland, and moved to Denmark as a child. Lerdorf studied at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he earned a bachelor's degree in systems design engineering.
Career
After university, Lerdorf worked for several companies including the Internet service provider IBM Canada and the software company Nexus Media. In 1995, he began developing a set of Common Gateway Interface tools for his personal web page, which he initially called "Personal Home Page Tools". Over time, he expanded the project into a full scripting language, releasing it publicly as PHP/FI (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter). This early version attracted interest from other developers, most notably Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, who later rewrote the parser and created PHP 3 and PHP 4.
Lerdorf continued to contribute to the PHP project and served as a core developer. He also worked on other open‑source projects, including the Apache HTTP Server, and co‑authored the book 1 . In 2002, he joined Yahoo! as a software engineer, and later held positions at WePay and Etsy. As of 2025, he is a principal engineer at JetBrains.
PHP and legacy
Lerdorf's design of PHP emphasised simplicity and ease of use for web development. The language has become one of the most widely used server‑side scripting languages, powering a large portion of the World Wide Web. While Lerdorf did not intend to create a general‑purpose programming language, his work laid the foundation for the modern PHP ecosystem, including frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony.
In addition to PHP, Lerdorf has contributed to the PostgreSQL and SQLite projects, and has spoken at numerous technology conferences, advocating for pragmatic programming and performance optimisation.