Imagine a world in which your career, the careers of your friends and coworkers, and the businesses and industries built on PHP vanished overnight, or never existed at all. No Facebook. No Wordpress. Billions of dollars in online commerce, all gone. Flickr, Tumblr, MailChimp: poof! This talk presents a dystopian world in which we are stuck updating each other via SMS or (gasp!) MySpace, reading content on corporate portals, and buying everything from just a handful of online marketplaces.

1. A WORLD WITHOUT PHP

3. (SCENE: SWITZERLAND, 2015.)

4. Mmm, fondue.How did I get
here?

5. (SCENE: WEB DEV, 1996)

8. Credit: Jud Dagnall
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

9. “I WAS LURKING ONE DAY ON USENET PERL FORUMS WHEN I SAW AN
ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT THE RELEASE OF PHP 2.0/FI, THE FIRST TRULY
PUBLIC VERSION OF PHP. I WAS GROWING WEARY OF TRYING TO GET
PERL WORKING VIA CGI AND FELL IN LOVE IMMEDIATELY WITH HOW
SIMPLE AND FAULT-TOLERANT MOD_PHP WITH APACHE WAS
COMPARED TO CGI HELL.”
IN 1996, THEY DIDN'T HAVE SITES LIKE REDDIT [OR] GOOGLE WHEN I
FIRST LEARNED PHP... PHP.NET'S SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY BARELY
WORKED. I DON'T REMEMBER… ANY REAL DOCUMENTATION UNTIL
AFTER PHP 4 CAME OUT IN MID-2000.
THERE WASN'T A SINGLE PHP IDE FOR ABOUT 5 YEARS, AND PHP DID
NOT HAVE DEBUGGING SUPPORT AT ALL.
- /u/hopeseekr (reddit)
https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/whc4r/history_lesson_what_php_coding_was_like_in_1996/

13. http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/12/07/a-history-of-the-dynamic-web/

14. (SCENE: TWITTER, 2016.)

15. PHP: Old enough to
drink in the USA!

16. “IF I DIDN’T START IT, SOMEONE WOULD HAVE.”
- Rasmus Lerdorf, 2016

17. “WHAT IF ‘THEY’ DIDN’T? WHAT IF NO ONE DID?”
- Me, 2016

20. (SCENE: CA. 2004, 2 YEARS POST-DOTCOM BOMB)

26. Credit: Nohat
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

30. NOPE, NO WIKIPEDIA.
WIKIPEDIA RUNS WIKIMEDIA…
A PHP PROJECT.
Credit: Nohat
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

36. http://www.php.net/usage.php

47. http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

48. http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

49. http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

50. http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

51. http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

52. http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

83. …are a part of the
PHP community
…aren’t a part of the
PHP community

91. @BENMARKS / BEN@MAGENTO.COM