# PHP

Standing (still-up). Founded 1995-06-08.
Site: [php.net](https://php.net)

Personal Home Page tools, 1995. The modern web's unfashionable load-bearing wall.

## Why it lasted
- WordPress, Wikipedia, Facebook's first decade, and a billion shared hosts.
- Cheap hosting plus a language that deploys as files is a distribution machine.
- The rewrite (PHP 7/8) made it fast after the industry had already written the obituary.

## Near deaths
- Every HN thread since 2008. The language kept running the sites those threads load.
- Hack/HHVM was supposed to be the grown-up fork. PHP 7 closed the gap and Facebook moved on.

## What would finish it
- WordPress moving off PHP. That is the actual kill switch, and it has not flipped.

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