PHP 7.0 Nearing Release, Performance Almost As Good As HHVM

An anonymous reader writes: PHP 7.0 RC2 was released on Friday. In addition to the new language features, PHP 7.0 is advertised as having twice the performance of PHP 5. Benchmarks of PHP 7.0 RC2 show that these performance claims are indeed accurate, and just not for popular PHP programs like WordPress. In tests done by Phoronix, the PHP performance was 2~2.5x faster all while consuming less memory than PHP 5.3~5.6. Facebook's HHVM implementation meanwhile still held a small performance lead, though it was consuming much more memory. PHP 7.0 is scheduled to be released in November.

Comments

Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is php even relevant any more?

It seems to be exclusively In the domain of non programmer - the kinds who constantly pump out insecure code.

And boy there is a lot of insecure web apps. I don't run php on a public facing server. For me it's the server version of flash on the desktop. You just know there's another joke just around the corner.

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

My take on your post is that 1) you caught a glimpse of one or two tiresome platitudes regarding PHP and decided to try play the solidarity card, but 2) you don't do any developing at all because you don't know programming, and 3) you don't do any hosting of any kind, because you don't know anything about that either.

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://githut.info/

Nope. Not relevant at all.

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's pretty much a garbage language. Inconsistent, full of insecure pitfalls, goofy syntax and overall completely horrendous. I had the misfortune of dealing with it for years. Never again.

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please. I work for a VC firm and do due diligence. While the guys doing server-side Java and C# are still talking about frameworks, the PHP guys are typically already supporting thousands or even millions of users. Yes, getting a good, bug-free v2 out the door is a challenge with PHP, most startups fail before even finishing a good v1. You can't get to v2 if you don't finish v1! I don't think the usual estimate that PHP is ten times as productive is far from the truth. For good, solid server-side code, I don't think you can beat Java with Spring, but it takes a lot longer and is a lot harder and more expensive to find engineers. Despite the fact our entire board and investors are made-up with former Microsoft people, the vast majority of successful startups we've funded have used PHP.

Re: Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

So to avoid the "server version of flash" you use what? Javascript? Straight html? Wait, let me guess: Java?

Re:Relevance?

[dgatwood]

Is php even relevant any more?

Sure. Lots of folks use PHP for writing quick server code, because it makes light work of prototyping things. If you know what you're doing, it is a solid programming language, offering a fairly clean, C-like syntax, without the horror of Perl's backwards instructions and bare regular expressions, the OO bloat of Java, the need to install additional interpreters (problematic on shared hosting services), etc.

Re:Relevance?

[Tough Love]

I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

Re:Relevance?

[ShanghaiBill]

I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

You know a language really sucks when switching to JavaScript is considered an improvement.

Re: Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

eh? C# is a great language.

Re: Relevance?

[dgatwood]

Yeah, I almost made a comment about the vast quantities of PHP code out there, but decided against it because so much of that code probably shouldn't be out there. These days, before I bring in any piece of PHP software, I tend to spend at least a day or two doing a cursory security audit in which I look for SQL injection and shell command argument passing vulnerabilities. I usually find some.

But yeah, at least from a jobs perspective, the community, codebase, support, and ease of hiring are what makes a language valuable. And the more bad code there is out there, the easier it is to get a job fixing all the holes. :-D

Re:Relevance?

[Art3x]

At first my web stack was: 10% JavaScript, 60% PHP, 10% Apache, and 20% PostgreSQL.
Now it's more like: 30% JavaScript, 10% PHP, 20% Apache, and 40% PostgreSQL, as I learned more about those other layers.

I try to limit the PHP to just a thin connection layer to the database:

$db = new PDO;
$q = 'select a fairly refined query that does all the calculation and filtering';
$q = $db->prepare($q);
$q->execute($v);

and as a templating language, using short tags and the alternate syntax:

<table>
<? foreach ($records as $r): ?>
    <tr>
        <td><?= h($r['id']) ?></td>
        <td><?= h($r['name']) ?></td>
        <td><?= h($r['note']) ?></td>
    </tr>
<? endforeach ?>
</table>

Re: Relevance?

[jon3k]

Python, Ruby or node.js. I think PHP gets a bad rap, personally. Sure its inconsistent and kind of clunky, but it's very approachable, relatively fast and runs everywhere. But it's also got a big messy history behind it, and it's an easy target to poke fun at.

Re:Relevance?

[KGIII]

Shh! Nobody is supposed to know that.

Re:Relevance?

[KGIII]

Their engineering degree? Well, I suspect they don't have one.

Re:Relevance?

[SQL Error]

Ruby has some issues, but it is superior to PHP in every possible way. And for the most part, vastly superior.

Re:Relevance?

[SQL Error]

What a lot of people fail to recognize about PHP when they rag on it is its immense framework support.

The problem is, the frameworks are awful too.

Having said that Node.js has taken over the relevancy of languages such as Ruby in later years (or competitors to PHP).

Yes, Node.js is a competitor to PHP in sheer misguided awfulness, and a bloody-minded insistence on doing everything in the worst possible way. But that is not, for most of us here, a reason to use it.

Re:Relevance?

[Aethedor]

Please, explain to me in what ways it's superior?

Re:Relevance?

[Bert64]

It's more like visual basic... Easy for people to learn, so attracts a lot of novice programmers who write poor code.

Re: Relevance?

[cyber-vandal]

C# is so dead they released a new version of it in July. I'm not sure why you think it's dependent on IE because I use Chrome for my web dev and it works fine.

Re:Relevance?

[dinfinity]

You know a language really sucks when switching to JavaScript is considered an improvement by one random guy on the internet.

FTFY.

Re: Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are whitewashing. ALL the stuff done in php is horribly insecure. unfit to be operated if not locked tightly into some small intranet.

here they hacked an entire cloud provider, hetzner, by means od some php dreck gui tool.

Re:Relevance?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

It gets the job done and makes me money every single day, so honestly, I don't care how inconsistent it is or how silly the syntax seems. I make my house payment with PHP every month and that's the bottom line.

Re:Relevance?

[slashdice]

It's worse than that -- all the non-programmers have moved to node!

Re:Relevance?

[Loconut1389]

This non-programmer of 20 some years makes 6 figures doing php. i learned c/c++ in college, wrote research and defense contracting apps in them, learned python and worked for companies everyone has heard of, etc. But PHP to my chagrin has been where the work was for me and ive had to keep doing it - but its one saving grace has been better and better strict options / hinting that help make better code. PHP is finally catching up.

Re:Relevance?

[narcc]

They don't actually know. The best you can hope for are some empty platitudes.

Re:Relevance?

[theArtificial]

Good thing no other languages enable writing of poor code otherwise we'd be in trouble!

Re:Relevance?

[dgatwood]

From my perspective, regular expressions outside the context of a string leads to, among other things, all sorts of fun for IDEs, where they can't properly do brace matching because you have a brace in a regex and they don't know what to do with it. The string syntax is much less problematic because they invariably follow bog-standard language parsing rules, which are much easier to handle than parsing regular expressions (where the rules are inconsistent from one language to the next in subtle ways, with Perl being the biggest mess).

What makes Perl's regular expression engine particularly nasty is that there's more than one way to do it. Don't like slashes as regex relimiters? Why not use brackets? Or parentheses? Or curly braces? The complexity of the parsing rules goes up by a sizable margin every time you add such "handy" features. And the way special characters are handled inside a regular expression depends on context, which makes it a serious pile of hurt.

By contrast, I can parse a regex in a C string in about three lines of code (count the number of double quote marks not preceded by an odd number of backslashes or inside single quotes, and if you get an odd number of double quote marks, you're inside a string), and any brace matching engine that can't handle such simple rules is just sad.

By backwards instructions, I mean that in C, you write this:

if (foo) bar();

whereas in Perl, you write this:

bar() if foo();

That design violates the norms of natural languages, where conditional expressions almost invariably precede the actions that they modify, and as such, leads to many an incorrect assumption when skimming other people's code.

Re:Relevance?

[dgatwood]

But you don't have to parse the regex! You have to parse the delimiters. It's the same three lines of C code, only with a / as delimiter instead of a "

If someone uses brackets as delimiters, your code has to also parse character classes correctly.

Re:Relevance?

[dgatwood]

You're an absolute fucking moron if you think that doesn't happen in natural languages.

It is legal in most natural languages, and is quite common in non-imperative sentences. However, for imperative sentences (commands), putting the action before the condition is not the normal way that people speak in most natural languages, precisely because it leads to mistakes. For example, in a high-stress situation, if one person shouts to another "Shoot her if she moves", there's a high probability that the other person will shoot reflexively before even hearing the last half of the sentence.

Similarly, shifting the "if" statement off to the right end of the line makes it much more likely to be missed by someone scanning down the column of text, because people naturally skim down the justified edge of a block of code, rather than the ragged edge. This language design anti-pattern makes Perl code considerably harder to skim than languages that do things in the more typical order of condition followed by action. (To be pedantic, C does provide one statement type—do-while—that puts the action before the condition, but the action is preceded by an additional token that makes it obvious that the action is conditional. This distinction matters.)

Re: Relevance?

[KingMotley]

.NET Framework isn't C#. It's a framework. I've never seen Mono used in a real production environment (Not that it can't be, it's just not nearly as common). I've never heard of DotGNU.

Which version of Python did you think was better than C#? The 2.x version, or the 3.x version that's mostly incompatible? Or are you using IronPython or the LLVM versions?

NodeJS

[maop]

I already switched to NodeJS because of the convenience of one language.

Re: NodeJS

[SQL Error]

So from an entirely awful language and environment to just an almost entirely awful one?

Re: NodeJS

[Billly Gates]

But but it is webscale with the complexities of assembler with the efficiency of Javascript

Re: NodeJS

[MenThal]

How's learning Mandarin going then?

Re:NodeJS

[joss]

I went down that route. However, I really missed being able to write code like this:

1 do this
2 do that

as opposed to

do_this(function(err,res) { if (err) {something..} else { do_that(res) })

Once your backend gets complicated, may the lord help you.

If you backend is simple, it doesn't matter what language you use.

There is a far superior language you can use on both ends: scala - scala.js is really nice

PHP Bashing

[TheBlackMan]

Weekly PHP bashing contest starting in 3...2... Aaaand I was late.

Student Suspended Over Suspected Use of PHP

[Anonymous Coward]

Student Suspended Over Suspected Use of PHP

Re: And que

[rHBa]

Cue if you're playing snooker or pool, queue if you'e standing in line.

Re: And que

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue if you're playing snooker or pool

... or if you're calling for someone to begin their performance, as in the OP.

Re: faster php?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the language is just a thin wrapper around various libraries, which is why so many functions are like that. Newer functions and classes are much cleaner, but there is a bunch of old junk still in there for compatability.

Used properly it is a nice language. Unfortunately most people don't bother to really learn it and just copy and paste code. A big flaw in the language is that it let's you get away with really awful code.

PHP works well, if you know what you're doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've written several commercial grade, industry wide web applications in PHP... can't consider a time when someone has hacked the site, jacked the site, or basically screwed it over because of some piss poor LANGUAGE flaw.

A great developer is what matters.

And I've seen my fair share of perl code that was completely stupid, filled with security holes and bugs up the ass.

Honestly, I've been using PHP for twelve years, and Java, C++, and C# for about as much... and frankly wonder WTF sort of mind it takes to even create a shitty application in the first place.

Am I an exception to the rule? Probably. But I'm excited for PHP 7. It works... if you know how to make it work.

I've seen enough shit websites built in PHP, and ASP, and perl, and C#, and JSP/Java... WTFever... and frankly, its not the language that's the problem.

Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing.

[Pikoro]

nail
head

Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing.

[Tough Love]

When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.

Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP has/had some genuine shitty misfeatures like register_globals, default error_reporting to the client, and magic_quotes.

If you've been writing code long enough, you've probably forgotten the awful stuff you wrote as a kid.

You become a great developer with years of experience and, in my opinion, treating it like engineering where you always keep in mind how to have the software fail safely; and treating it like people are *actively trying* to make your software break and covering your inputs and outputs and domains. Your car needs an engine, but brakes are just as important.

Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing.

[tingentleman]

Want to keep your skills 1337 and exclusive? You need a language with a predisposition to ideologically bureaucratic code and a ton of scaffolding that ensures even simple tasks take several days paid consultancy time. PHP is not for you, my insecure coding buddy.

Want to get a new start-up to market rapidly without an enormous team? Choosing something simple that gets out of your way gives the best chance of success.

Worried about the lack of strong typing causing bugs? Ask yourself this - how many production system bugs have you ever had in your life that would have been caught by a type-militant language at compile time? 99% of the time bugs are due to bad application design. HIRE GOOD PROGRAMMERS. If they need baby sitting to the point that they pass arrays to a function that needs an int then DON'T HIRE THEM.

Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL

[MightyMartian]

I hate PHP, but that doesn't mean I go around waving my dick. PHP is like VB6, it sucks but a boatload of code is written in it.

Cost of deployment of Node.js

[tepples]

I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

Including cost of deployment, especially on a small slice of a leased server? PHP has long had a deployment cost advantage. It also has some very widely used applications. What Node.js based forum software is better than phpBB? What Node.js based wiki software is better than MediaWiki? And what Node.js based blog software is any good?

Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js

[Anonymous Coward]

none. node.js is not reliable enough in a production server environment.
Its ok for proof of concept and testing out ideas, but garbage for infrastucture.
I've pulled all our code out of node.js now for our product, just to get something I don't have to watch like a hawk.
PHP is reliable at least.

Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

What Node.js based forum software is better than phpBB? What Node.js based wiki software is better than MediaWiki? And what Node.js based blog software is any good?

1) None.
2) None.
3) None.

They don't exist because writing these applications in Hode.js would be stupid and pointless.

(I personally prefer SMF to phpBB, but both of them are pretty capable forum systems.)

Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js

[tepples]

Why the fuck would you want that?

Because not everybody who wants to put up a website has the money for a dedicated server.

How is that relevant when deciding what platform to use for a new application?

Because you may want to develop your application to connect to an existing application's authentication framework or as an extension for an existing application.

Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js

[jean-guy69]

Node.js forum software => NodeBB
I use it and IMHO it is pretty decent

Node.js blog software => Ghost

Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js

[jean-guy69]

As for not being production ready, the Joyent IaaS solution SmartDataCenter heavily uses Node.js
It is used on many public / private cloud including Joyent public one..

Re:Cost of deployment of Node.js

[tepples]

Sucks to be them

What would you recommend instead for those for whom it sucks to be?

Six problems, some of which PHP 7 addresses

[tepples]

As I wrote in my article about PHP, some very simple coding standards analogous to those described in Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts will work around most of the stuff described in the "fractal" article. This left six distinct points, some of which PHP 7 addresses to an extent.

• Number-like comparison of strings can never be fully turned off. PHP 7 type hints diminish this somewhat, as you at least know what types you are getting in and out of a function.
• Parse errors are fatal rather than causing include_once to throw an exception the way Python's import does. PHP 7 converts many fatal errors to engine exceptions.
• Inconsistent naming conventions and duplicate functionality. PHP 7 removes some of the duplicate functionality.
• Associativity for the ternary ? : operator is on the less useful side. PHP 7 adds an additional null coalescing operator ?? whose associativity is on the useful side.
• No keyword arguments. PHP 7 does not change this.
• No file-level selection of old or new semantics the way Python has from __future__ import some_feature.

Mongo DB is web scale

[goombah99]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Mongo DB is web scale

[Billly Gates]

No Only Erlang reborn as OTP psychobitch is both webscale and kickass for hipsters

Performancce is not what the HHVM is about

[EmperorOfCanada]

My theory about the HHVM is that you have all this top talent at FB who are forced to either use PHP to work on the core product or they can use other languages but not hang out with the core developers. Thus the HHVM would be much like the JVM in that it would allow for PHP to be end run and other languages could run inside the VM.

Also working on the VM would appeal to the academic pseudo cred that they want while working at the very heart of FB. In theory this end run will allow these top tier developers to go to conferences and say, I am a core developer at FB, I work on the key features, but I am not a pathetic hack using PHP, I am a god programming in (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Go, Rust, R, Erlang, etc) and thus I am beyond mere mortals who program in the pedestrian languages that are so far beneath me that can barely think about them.

All this without spitting in Zuckerberg's face and telling him his life's work was done like a two bit hack using the tools of a nube.

But some of the wind might be taken out of their sails if PHP 7 comes along and eats at the main metric that they can use to justify this end run. I suspect that somehow stats will be pulled out that show that under carefully crafted circumstances that lowly mortals can barely understand that HHVM is so much better than PHP 7 that it completely justifies the massive efforts that have gone into HHVM.

The real test will be to see if some organizations such as Wikipedia then dump HHVM to return to the less complex deployment environment found in PHP 7.

Re:Performancce is not what the HHVM is about

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting theory, what do you base it off of?

Specifically, developing hhvm for academic pseudo cred so they can sit at the hipster's conference table. Almost nobody gives a shit about the languages you listed. (Well, I can see Go maybe getting traction...)

In my opinion hiphop and hhvm were justified because php is so goddamn slow.

Re:Performancce is not what the HHVM is about

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have met many programmers who became religious about particular technologies. I know an electrical engineer who wants to pretty much set fire to the arduino factory. His argument is that the entire at family of controllers are for amateurs. He was royally pissed when I found one in a brand name toothbrush.

Then you get XML people who think that JSON is basically satan's breath. Or Python 3.x people who think that Python 2.7 people should all be thrown into a pit. But PHP is about the least "academic" language in the world. If you go to a ML conference and your slides and sample code are in R, matlab, Python, or the newest ML fad lua then you will get approving nods. But if you pulled out a strong AI written in PHP they would tar and feather you and nobody would cite your paper, they would cite the paper where someone redid your AI in a "proper" language.

Even the people accomplishing these astounding performance increases in PHP aren't getting much cred. If someone altered either of the core pythons to get this kind of performance they would be hailed as heros. But instead the PHP developers are looked at with a mixture of hatred and scorn. Scorn because PHP was seen as so slow. And hatred because now PHP will live to fight their favourite language another day.

My theory on PHP is that one of the problems that many people have with PHP is that it was written to do a set of jobs very well. It is an excellent language for non-programmers who are wanting to make their html more powerful and it is a great language for quick and dirty tasks. Whereas if you look at Python 2.7 it very much was in this same sort of spirit of simplicity. But Python 3.x is getting more and more "Pythonic" which generally means that it no longer reads like Pseudocode but you have to actually parse the code in your head in order to understand what is going on. This is great for people who want to be able to separate themselves by being experts in their language. The key being that expert is a separate definition than being good. Expert, as in they know the ins and outs of the language. Whether they can write quality, easy to maintain code, is a whole other skill that often the "experts" in a single language never seem to focus on.

PHP with its extreme focus on just getting the damn job done seems to really piss these sorts off. Thus my theory that the "experts" at FB hate PHP and aren't really interested in getting the damn job done, but instead want to impress people with their HHVM. This gives a whole lot more cred then having built a better way to upload a fart joke to your friends.

It's not about the language

[Aethedor]

This endless PHP bashing is getting a bit sad. Sure, earlier versions of PHP did have some bad things, but with PHP 5 it's very easy to create solid applications. You still may not like PHP, that's fine. In that case the only wise thing to do is to choose something else. But for any badly written application in PHP 5 I'm 100% sure that the programmer is to blame, not the language. Yes, looking at all the other modern programming languages these days, that I think that's the case for all of them. But PHP 5 is a modern and mature programmming language and has everything you need to write a modern web application. It can easily compete with the others.

To all those PHP-haters: bash and whine whatever you like. The world doesn't care. Look at the statistics: PHP is used much by many. It's here to stay. Grow up and move on.

Myself, I use PHP a lot. I've written my own framework. I really like PHP, because it's easy to use and specially because it's so easy to deploy. Easier than many other languages. I'm really looking forward to what PHP 7 has to offer.

Re: And que

[ChunderDownunder]

Sorry, just reading The Politics of Star Trek article.

DonÂt forget Q, the omnipotent person/race.

PHP 6.0?

[Drinking Bleach]

What happened to PHP 6.0? Are they skipping a version just to one-up Perl?

Re:PHP 6.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP 6 was supposed to be the version after PHP 5.2 (or was it 5.1?).

However, there where huge snags related with the unicode, which was delaying everything over and over again.

The end result was that PHP 6 functionalities where cut down and released in subsequent 5.x release in more manageable release steps.

PHP is a solid language, i just find it infuriating that after all this years, they still didn't realized that to make it a proper language they will need to do some code cleanup in the core of it, specially with the dreadful refresh loop which forces every request to reload the code.

The opcache alleviates the problem, but it is just a band-aid.

And language uniformity is something that was always talked about since PHP 4, and never addressed. Even after 15 years of PHP you will still refer to the manual because it is impossible to memorize all the different function names. Is it strlen, str_len or string_length? What comes first the needle or the object?

And then, there is always the problem of the "script" culture. Bashing a couple of lines of code can solve one problem, but is the code maintainable? Most probably not.

Proper use of software engineering processes is something that still needs to get into the head of most developers of PHP.

And nope, just having unit tests is not a solution if your tests are crap.

Re: PHP - 21st Century COBOL

[Aethedor]

Banshee

Re: PHP - 21st Century COBOL

[Aethedor]

Banshee

Re:hahahahahaaha

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I was reading,waiting for your language retort, then I read java

do you actually take yourself serious?

I laughed too, especially at the "stellar performance" bit. Ya gotta admit, that was funny.

Re:PHP - 21st Century COBOL

[squiggleslash]

Java is 21st Century COBOL. PHP is... something else entirely.

Java and COBOL are programming languages that you do massive waterfall projects in. They're both designed to be easily readable and validatable by a reasonably qualified third party. (Yes, I know, Java routinely fails at that, in part because the assumption was that "everyone knows C" and so the syntax was based upon that, without any investigation into C's flaws) They're designed for slow, deliberate, programming by programmers who are reading from a spec.

PHP is much more free form, for better or worse. That's the root of why the two schools look down on one another, with PHP programmers able to point at higher productivity, and Java/COBOL programmers able to point at "right first time" solid code with few security flaws upon the eventual first release of their code.

Not a PHP fan myself, but that's because the syntax and feature list are shitty. A cleaned up PHP-like language would be very valuable, though many would argue that's exactly what Javascript - the language, not the framework built into browsers - is.

Re: There is no perfect tool, but it doesn't matte

[Anonymous Coward]

php was specifically designed to make the internet a insecure place and all your propaganda wont change this.

it still is untyped and that opens a shitload of attack avenues. some folks like this, others are less interested in war...

Re: And que

[pspahn]

"Que" means nothing, unless you're speaking spanish.

Or eating deliciously prepared meats cooked with fire and smoke.

Works like a charm

[proibido]

Like any other language that suits his purpose - when well coded!

I've been using PHP in web development for 10 years now and I can say it has very good features along with some flaws but, once again, just like any other language.

People read "PHP" and think automatically in(secure) phpBB or Joomla but you can write your own PHP code/framework/project, you know. Just make sure if it fits your needs first before you say it doesn't do the job. Maybe you just chose the wrong set of tools for the job.

Damn, I even write shell scripts with it and been replacing old bash scripts for PHP!

Alternate theory

[bigsexyjoe]

Facebook uses PHP so it's developers don't get really great job offers from other companies, as PHP pay doesn't generally go as high as pay for things like Java.

Re:I'm that first poster

[KingMotley]

The first version of ASP (Active Server Pages) was RELEASED in 1996 after a couple years of betas, and the first version of PHP as we know it (PHP/FI 2.0) wasn't until 1997. There was "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)" in which PHP came from dating back to 1995, but it wasn't a stand alone language like we know it.

As someone who was actually using ASP in 1994, I can definitely say it predated PHP, even if you consider "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)" being announced in 1995.