PHP was designed to solve what I (and others, such as PHP's creator, Rasmus Ledorf) call "The Web Problem," by which we mean the challenges found in the creation of dynamic server-side applications on the Internet or on an intranet. PHP was created to—and continues to evolve to—solve this single problem, which perhaps is the biggest reason why it's been a (if not the) Internet programming language of choice for such a long time. In fact, PHP is the fourth most popular programming language in the world, according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, above C++, Perl, Python and Ruby.