PHP Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the purpose of the PHP "final" keyword, when applied specifically to a method?

Question 2

What is the purpose of PHP's "?php" opening tag?

Question 3

What is a common reason a slow-running PHP application might benefit from adding a caching layer, such as Redis or Memcached?

Question 4

What is the purpose of PHP's "$_COOKIE" superglobal array?

Question 5

What is PHPUnit primarily used for?

Question 6

What is the purpose of PHP's "require_once" (or "include_once") statement?

Question 7

What is the purpose of PHP's "Iterator" interface?

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About PHP

PHP has one of the more underrated stories in web development. Rasmus Lerdorf created it in 1994 as a small set of tools for tracking visits to his own personal homepage, and the name originally stood literally for "Personal Home Page." It grew almost by accident into one of the most widely deployed server-side languages on the entire internet, eventually getting the tongue-in-cheek recursive backronym "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" that it still carries today.

Much of PHP's technical foundation runs on the Zend Engine, built by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, who took over much of the language's core development in the late 1990s and whose company, Zend Technologies, remained closely tied to PHP's evolution for decades afterward.

PHP's reputation took a real beating over the years from developers who associated it with messy, insecure code from its earlier, more freewheeling era, and that criticism wasn't always unfair at the time. But it largely misses how much the language has matured since. Modern PHP, especially PHP 8 and later, is fast, strongly typed where a developer wants it to be, and includes a just-in-time compiler that gave it a significant performance boost over earlier versions.

Facebook's own experience running PHP at absolutely massive scale led the company to build entirely new tooling around it rather than abandon the language, including a custom virtual machine called HHVM and a related language called Hack, both designed specifically to make PHP-style code run faster and more reliably at Facebook's size.

What often surprises people is just how much of the modern web still runs on PHP. WordPress alone, which is built entirely on PHP, powers well over 40 percent of all websites globally, meaning PHP quietly touches far more of the internet than its sometimes-dated reputation would suggest.

Frameworks like Laravel have also done a lot to modernize the everyday experience of writing PHP, bringing the kind of clean, expressive tooling developers associate with newer languages to a language that's actually been around since the mid-1990s.

Despite plenty of competition from newer languages, several major websites still run significant parts of their infrastructure on PHP today. Wikipedia's underlying software, MediaWiki, is written in PHP and has been since the site's earliest days, and Slack's original backend was built on PHP as well, later evolving alongside the company's growth rather than being thrown out entirely.

Etsy is another well-known example, having built and scaled a large e-commerce marketplace on PHP for years while publishing detailed engineering blog posts about the performance tooling they built specifically to keep a PHP codebase fast at serious scale, helping shift some of the language's reputation within the broader engineering community over time.

PHP's annual developer surveys have shown a slow but genuine shift in sentiment over the past several years too, as more developers who actually work with modern PHP report a far more positive experience than the language's old, occasionally mocked reputation might suggest, a gap between perception and current reality that shows up in very few other programming languages quite as starkly.