PHP has long been considered as one of the most popular programming languages by developers the world over. In spite of the immense popularity of the language and the various advantages it offers, it did lack on one front – the absence of a formal specification. No more!
As an open source project, PHP has a wide variety of developers working on it and some of the developers that oversee the language are now working, after 20 long years, to assemble a detailed documentation about PHP and how it is supposed to work. While most developers agree that PHP has never really needed a formal specification, many developers have long felt that a formal specification that defines PHP will go a long way in further developing the language. Program Director of software development research at IDC, Al Hilwa echoes this sentiment.
Prior to the assimilation of a formal specification, if someone wanted to get an idea of how PHP worked, they would have to study the behavior of the Zend Engine, which reflected the behavior of the language itself. While this worked fine in the case of a single implementation of PHP, it did present a problem for when multiple implementations were made, especially in the case of those that were different from the Zend Engine. And therein lies the need for a formal specification of the language.
The announcement was first made by PHP core contributor, Sara Goleman at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in July in Portland, Oregon. Goleman is also a part of the Facebook team as a software engineer. While Facebook may have abandoned its attempt to implement its website on the PHP platform, it did not stop the social media giant from creating the HipHop Virtual Machine, which helps PHP run faster. This goes to show that a formal specification can help other developers implement PHP on various other platforms and improve the current standing of the programming language by adding innovations and tweaks to it.
There is however some bad news. While the specification covers the PHP language itself, it does leave out explanations on PHP’s runtime library. This means that people who are new to the language will still have trouble understanding features like the erratic function naming, disruptive database access and the unpredictable return values and function arguments.
PHP was first created 20 years ago by Rasmus Lerdorf in the year 1994 as part of a series of Common Gateway Interface Perl scripts in order to maintain his personal homepage. The latest stable version of PHP is PHP 5.6, which was released on 28th August, 2014.
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