Rasmus Lerdorf Comes To Town
Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of the programming language PHP, came to Cal Poly yesterday to give a two-hour lecture on PHP and related web technologies. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was pleased to find he’s a very intelligent, pragmatic, and humorous person. He spoke at length about the transition of PHP into an open source project, the evolution of the language, and some security and performance topics that I found very interesting. He works at Yahoo full time on PHP right now, and apparently they use PHP everywhere, so they have him optimize and improve PHP for their own needs and then contribute his work back to the open source project so that everyone benefits. He also demonstrated Yahoo’s JavaScript user interface library, which was pretty nifty. I wish we could get more big names in computer science to come talk to us. I’d listen.
Tags: cal poly, javascript, languages, php, programming, rasmus lerdorf, web, yahoo, yui
February 21st, 2008 at 4:37 pm
That sounds like an awesome event. I know nothing about PHP, but I love it when people who work in the corporate sphere still contribute to open source initiatives.
By the way, speaking of everything open source, did you get my facebook invite about Brewster Kahle, the guy who does the Internet Archive and the Wayback machine? I am so excited!
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I did, but I don’t think I can make it. I’ve been out of town too much this quarter and I have to buckle down and get some work done. I’m starting to fret that I won’t finish my thesis on time. It sounds really cool, though; I’d definitely go if I was in the area.