PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf has left his long-held position at Yahoo, according to his Twitter account. Lerdorf joined Yahoo in 2002 and has worked for the company as an engineer since. Lerdorf is most notable for creating the original PHP engine, and for being a notable open source developer, speaker and author. Lerdorf developed PHP in 1995 after building up a collection of C macros that he was using in web application development. The original meaning of the acronym is ‘Personal HomePage’, and the language and environment are still the most popular in use on the web today.
PHP was developed further and commercialized by Zend, but Lerdorf has maintained an ongoing involvement with the open source project. Lerdorf has worked at a number of companies since first developing PHP, but has spent a large part of his professional career with Yahoo and he had a strong association with the company. Lerdorf is one of a number of star engineers and developers who have left Yahoo in recent times, and the stable of notable and high-profile engineers at the company has whittled out.
Lerdorf has been more recently noted for his blog posts, such as his outline on his philosophy to developing PHP applications: The no-framework PHP framework.
And there goes my fearless leader. Where’s he going next?
damn 1st, icahn…. next, senior executive basier oijeh.. now the GOD FATHER of PHP? damn, Please oust Carol Bartz now… People should open their eyes that YAHOO is falling down on a slippery slope…
http://bit.ly/i...l-bartz-a-loser
From the time she was appointed the CEO, I was sure Y! will go on a slippery slope (other were a bit hesitant to say it) but now we are seeing the real side of the story.
2 senior member of a company leaving on same week? What are the odds, that Y! is going to armagedon?
sorry I got carried away here’s the full link to prove how Bartz is dragging Y! into hell (literally)
http://bit.ly/i...l-bartz-a-loser
Had an opportunity to meet Rasmus in Bangalore several times during the FOSS conferences as he is actively involved with the community , have to say that he is very humble and down to earth . the Combination of Humility and Intellect define him.
Praveen
Any idea of what his future projects are?
(Shameless self promotion for my PHP ORM: http://www.getdorm.com )
Never met him, but seems like a good guy. Based on some internal postings I think the final straw was the Microsoft deal.
Rasmus is a huge talent and a wonderful guy. Looking forward to seeing what’s next for him.
he tweeted he was leaving when yahoo signed the bing deal
Uh, you mean acronym, not anagram.
Wow! I didn’t even know this guys name. Because PHP has been with us for a loong time now he hasnt had the privele of getting the fame like for instance Jimmey Wales does. One question: what is he going to do now?
Yahoo CEO must go if she cannot appreciate the talents. Oh well, she does not know the meaning of the word ’search’.
Dude, You don’t know the difference between PHP and search? Rasmus was not even close to Search… Do you think Yahoo! Search engine is written in PHP? You must be kidding..
Last I checked another one of the PHP Developers, Sara Golemon, does work in search at Yahoo.
That’s what her twitter profile says anyway: http://twitter.com/SaraMG
I met Rasmus at a Yahoo HackU event at CMU. I didn’t know he founded PHP at the time. I asked him a few questions about how to set up the headers in my PHP project and he was very knowledgeable and helpful. He seems like a very nice guy to me and I wish him well.
It would be nice to see a list of such people in Crunchbase in some seperate section as not all are that well known.
anybody can add them to Crunchbase – either anonymously and it goes into moderation, or login with FB and add entries
nice info!
This is very sad news. Why did Rasmus Lerdorf leave Yahoo? Sounds like he was and is a cornerstone of what Yahoo is today. Big corporate America sometimes isn’t what we think it is or should be. When one door closes another one will open up. I bet Rasmus was getting job offers as he walked out the door of the Yahoo office headquarters. Good luck to you Rasmus and best wishes!
Yahoo has to downsize. He was one of the people that needed to go. He decided to voluntarily leave.
So you’re saying he’s a noted, notable sort of guy?
Yahoo must be a Potemkin village by now. That woman has cored out the entire guts of the company and only brought the stock up to 16. Their profitability stinks considering all the cannibalization that is going towards achieving it. Yahoo has no future and I think everyone knows it.
Hope he can continue to be involved in open source projects. Such a talented person~
His article
http://toys.ler...-framework.html is a real nice read .It says about how you could build a secure Web 2.00 website .
Had the privilege of sitting in a couple of Rasmus’ talks when I was at Yahoo. Definitely a smart guy, and yeah, very very traditionalist when it comes to PHP’s usage – I suppose that’s probably to be expected.
But yeah, he just ended up being one of those smart guys who built something to make dynamic content a little easier on Web pages and ended up providing the right solution at the right place at the right time and it took off.
I can hardly wait to see whats next for Rasmus…
PHP is such a useful tool…
~Patricia Kaehler – DomainBELL
Very sad that such incredible talent continues to walk out the door a year into Carol’s regime. While she has demonstrated competence as a good operational executive she has yet to demonstrate any compelling product vision for the company which it desperately needs. I recently re-read the “Peanut Butter Manifesto” and this statement is still very very true:
The quote from Peanut Butter manifesto:
We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course
A sad news for yahoo!!!!!
The man is a legend! Can’t wait to see what he does next.
Carol should take some technical lesson to understand that core of any technical company is its technical talent team. Letting them go in such a easy way cant be justified by any means. If it continues, very soon one day you will be just an front page html producing company where all back-ends will be developed by companies like Microsoft. Best of luck yahoo.
Would the last person to leave Yahoo please turn off the lights? Also…please grab some servers and office chairs and leave them in the Salvation Army drop box down the street….thanks…
Ah, Rasmus. You were required once.
Nice shirt.
I’m surprised why this is so bad for Yahoo according to a lot of the comments.
Rasmus is probably a much better fit for a company with any computer language or development platform in it’s portfolio (Google, Sun/Oracle). Besides I’m not that excited about PHP. I’ve developed in this language for 9 years and have seen too much disadvantages. One of them is performance, even JavaScript is able to outrun PHP;
http://shootout...g2=v8&box=1
I have to disagree with my fellow Yahoos. Nothing personal, but it’s good his leaving. If wall street was based on reality, the stock would double on this news.
Have to agree with yinst user.
While there was some cachet in having the PHP founder on staff, I can’t point to many contributions by Rasmus that reinforced Y! horizontally or improved Y! vertically, or simply made anyone proud to have him on team.
The development practices he preached tirelessly were at best throwbacks to an era where performance was the only driving concern and trumped notions of design or maintainability.
In an environment where Yahoo was having tremendous difficulty achieving internal platform reuse and consistency, let alone external product relevance, Rasmus’ advice about developing web applications was essentially, “forget what you know about writing software. Throw all your code into one file and let it ride. This is The Way.”
He loudly encouraged developers to cut corners to save milliseconds of compute time per request, rather than push an agenda to improve PHP’s performance deficiencies at the engine level or find compromises while PHP sorted out its problems.
True, his advice might have saved a few capex dollars at first, especially when Y! was reeling from the forced switchover to PHP 4 that instantly doubled many properties’ server needs.
But this advice was tacit admission that, despite being PHP’s founder, Rasmus held diminishing sway over the technical direction of the technology that made him famous. It was a tacit admission that he held no hope PHP would get any more performant.
Contrast his legacy to that of Steve Souders or Doug Cutting, who are synonymous with web performance and cloud computing, respectively. Or Paul Saab.
Rasmus will forever be synonymous with PHP, but much as Jason Alexander will forever be synonymous with George.
So was Rasmus a mascot? A life-size penguin plush would have been cheaper and might have inspired better code.
So, what’s next for Rasmus?
Yahoo seems to be experiencing a brain drain… not a good sign when all the top dogs are leaving.