PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. It began as a simple scripting language for generating dynamic web pages and has grown over 20+ years to become one of the most popular web development languages. PHP 7 was released in December 2015 and brought major performance improvements through optimizations in the Zend engine. While some criticize PHP's design, others appreciate how easy it is to learn, install, and find work developing with PHP due to its large community and number of open source projects that use it.