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.