Yet it powers 77% of the entire internet. 🐘 

WordPress. Laravel. Facebook. Wikipedia. Slack. All built on PHP. 

Here's the complete 31-year evolution every developer should know: 

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📌 1994 — PHP 1.0 Rasmus Lerdorf wrote some Perl scripts to track visitors on his resume website. He called it "Personal Home Page Tools." Nobody knew this would become the backbone of the web. 

📌 1997 — PHP 3.0 Zeev Suraski & Andi Gutmans rewrote it from scratch. The Zend Engine was born. PHP became a real language. 

📌 2000 — PHP 4.0 Zend Engine 1 shipped. Sessions, output buffering, massive performance gains. PHP started powering real businesses. 

📌 2004 — PHP 5.0 ⭐ True Object-Oriented Programming arrived. Classes, interfaces, PDO, exceptions, Zend Engine 2. This is when PHP grew up. 

📌 2009 — PHP 5.3 Namespaces. Closures. Late static binding. Laravel's entire foundation was built on this version. 

📌 2012–2014 — PHP 5.4 to 5.6 Traits, short array syntax [], built-in web server. Composer exploded. The PHP ecosystem never looked back. 

📌 2015 — PHP 7.0 🚀 2× faster than PHP 5. Scalar type hints, return types, null coalescing (??), spaceship operator (<=>). PHP had its biggest rebirth. 

📌 2017–2019 — PHP 7.1 to 7.4 Arrow functions, typed properties, array unpacking, FFI. Modern PHP — clean, fast, expressive. 

📌 2020 — PHP 8.0 🔥 JIT Compiler. Named arguments. Match expression. Nullsafe operator (?>). Union types. Attributes. PHP proved it wasn't just surviving — it was thriving. 

📌 2021 — PHP 8.1 Enums (finally!). Fibers. Readonly properties. Intersection types. Never return type. 

📌 2022 — PHP 8.2 Readonly classes. True/false/null as standalone types. Deprecated dynamic properties — cleaner code enforced. 

📌 2023 — PHP 8.3 Typed class constants. json_validate(). Improved randomness. Better stack traces for debugging. 

📌 2024 — PHP 8.4 ✨ Property Hooks. Asymmetric visibility. New array functions. HTML5 parser built-in. 

📌 2025 — PHP 8.5 🆕 Pipe operator (|>). Clone With syntax. Built-in URI extension. array_first() / array_last(). #[\NoDiscard] attribute. PHP is not slowing down. At all. 

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31 years. 14 major versions. 77% of the web. 

The real lesson here? 

A language doesn't die as long as it keeps solving real problems. PHP didn't survive three decades by luck. It survived because millions of developers — like you and me — kept building with it, improving it, and betting their careers on it. 

The next time someone tells you PHP is dead — show them this list. 😄 

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Which PHP version did YOU start with? 

If this was useful, repost it for someone who still thinks PHP is irrelevant.