PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a server-side programming language that has been in use since the late 1990s. It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts to track visits to his online resume. However, with the release of PHP 2.0 in 1997, the language began to evolve into a more robust and powerful tool for web development. One of the key contributors to the early development of PHP was Andi Gutmans, who joined the project in 1997 and helped to rewrite the core of the language, making it faster and more efficient. This led to the release of PHP 3.0 in 1998, which introduced several new features such as support for databases and a more modular architecture. With version 4.0 in 2000, PHP became a fully object-oriented language, making it easier for developers to create complex and scalable applications. This version also added support for XML, making it easier to integrate with other technologies. In 2004, PHP 5.0 was released, bringing with it significant improvements in performance and security. This version also introduced the concept of namespaces, which allowed for better organization and management of code. The next major release, PHP 7.0, came out in 2015 and introduced a new version of the Zend Engine, the core of the PHP interpreter. This resulted in a huge boost in performance, making PHP one of the fastest scripting languages available. The most recent release, PHP 8.0, came out in 2020 and introduced a number of new features and improvements, including the JIT compiler, which further improves the speed of PHP. Over the years, the popularity of PHP has continued to grow, with it being used by millions of websites and powering some of the biggest and most popular online platforms such as Facebook and Wikipedia. Its evolution has made it a versatile and powerful language that is constantly adapting to the changing needs of the web development community. With a dedicated community of developers constantly working to improve and enhance the language, the future of PHP looks bright and promising.