He co-authored and inspired the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participating in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead (who later created blo.gs), Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski.

Lerdorf was born on Disko Island in Greenland and moved to Denmark in his early years.

He contributed to the Apache HTTP Server and he added the LIMIT clause to the mSQL DBMS.

A variant of this LIMIT clause had already been around for a decade in mainframe relational database management systems (like Oracle Rdb running on VMS, formerly from Digital Equipment Corporation), but apparently it had not yet been picked up by the emerging PC-based databases.

[12] In 2003, Lerdorf was named in the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.