Many thanks to nathanintu who posted this item in BPN ;)
Yahoo! has switched to open-sourced scripting language PHP, for its backend.
The California based company chose PHP in favour of it"s old systrem which was written in C/C++. Yahoo serves 1.5 billion page views a day, and has already adopted open-source software such as Apache and FreeBSD.
In 1994, Yahoo! called open-sourced too "immature" to run large complex websites, but Yahoo! now believe the Apache-backed PHP project is better then using C/C++. PHP code is embedded in normal HTML pages, meaning it is a easy language to learn and easy to switch in and out of PHP.
Yahoo! claims that server-side languages were the next step, and that PHP fitted inside Yahoo"s plans and was very successful. Yahoo chose PHP over other languages such as ASP, Cold Fusion, and Perl because it was designed specificly for web scripting and has a large community of loyal fans and users, according to Internetnews.com