Started with Laravel 4. Back then it was a lightweight framework — routes, Eloquent, Blade, done. Now the box ships with queues, broadcasting, events, policies, gates, notifications, API resources, Sanctum, Pennant, Folio, Volt, Prompts, Reverb, Pulse… The list grows every year.
For someone picking it up today, this isn’t a framework anymore — it’s an entire ecosystem where figuring out where to start is a project in itself. The docs are great, genuinely. But there’s so much of them now that just reading through everything takes a week.
On the flip side, when you need to ship a real product in a month — everything’s right there. No agonizing over which of 15 queue packages to use or hunting for a decent WebSocket server. Install Reverb, move on.
Feels like Laravel is heading toward becoming Rails for PHP — a platform that covers absolutely everything. The question is whether they can keep the onboarding simple. So far they’re pulling it off, but every release raises the bar just a little.
Laravel and Rails both move too fast for me. When I tried to do some small side project and had to pause for a year or so, by the time I got back basically the whole framework had changed.
Too much work fighting the framework than actually getting shit done.
I am by no means a programmer, but I tried to learn Laravel a couple times mostly out of interest, and it was WAY too big and complex. I just gave up.
After years of PHP, I saw myself learning new concepts and decided if I was going to expand my horizons, it was going to be with Python. I am currently testing my very last PHP/Laravel project for a client. After this, I do Python and not much else. If Django decides I am going to swim to the bottom of the Marianas, then that is exactly what we are going to do.
yeah that’s exactly where I am at.
I wrote smaller webservers in nodejs, flask, Django, Laravel, PHP/Xampp, and even C.
Xampp was hard, and modifying PHP files for other frameworks was difficult because it remains a very counter intuitive language for me, but in comparison Laravel was awful. It made absolutely no sense to me and that was about 5 years ago.
I’d literally prefer writing a webserver in rust before I wanna take another shot at Laravel.
Having only recently written a webserver in Rust, it’s 100% the way to go. With Rust you don’t get the batteries included thing and you write the glue yourself, but I’d rather do that than use something like Laravel for a small project. They’re not even batteries included anymore, they’re waaay beyond that.
When I was doing this project, and I was doing a presentation for the client, the client looked at me like WTF is this mess. And it was. I scratched it, restarted, kept it tighter, it was more tedious, but finally we are in beta testing. I did not appreciate this experience, and afterwards, I looked at everything and decided I was done with PHP.
if I was going to expand my horizons
Python is well liked and beloved, but it never captivated me or felt intuitive.
Writing magic init logic feels like a hacky workaround, like putting frameworks and concepts around what is, at its core, a scripting language. If you’re committed to it, maybe you’ll get past that barrier and find it’s good, I don’t know, I never got there. From outside, and with experience in other languages/ecosystems, it just never felt correct to me.
Have you considered alternatives? For example, C#/dotnet?
Just my experience/opinion. As I said, it seems well beliked by others. I can’t speak for their views or experiences.
I don’t mind that. Never been a fan of C#/Dotnet. My brother does it and I’ve seen him do it and he seems to enjoy it, but, its not for me.
Scope creep? Mission creep?
The question is whether they can keep the onboarding simple.
I think that gap between the docs and actual tech is adequately covered by Laracasts, but I’d agree with your overall message. A lot of these package choices should be directly left to the development team to make, not made for them by the framework.
bot spam
the em-dashes are getting to me, but I can’t tell if this is AI or not
It is. All their posts are.
I really hate the “em-dash = AI” myth. I’ve probably been typing em-dashes since before half of y’all were born. I am not a
catbot. I will not cede the em-dash to AI!As with most ills of the tech world, I blame Microsoft for this. Windows makes it unreasonably difficult to type em-dashes (and most non-ASCII characters, really), which is probably why most people don’t. It’s always been easy enough on Macs going back to the 80s — option-shift-dash. It’s easy on iOS and Android too. Linux is a mixed bag, I guess — I’ve edited my keyboard settings on Linux and I forget the defaults on different distros/DEs.
At least AI doesn’t use parentheses as much as I do. I’ve still got that going for me.
yeah I get that; it’s why I said “but I can’t tell if this is AI or not”. If you check OP’s post history, they too use em-dashes everywhere. Again it’s not something that immediately makes you a bot, but if I’m personally encountering more bots using em-dashes than actual humans it’s easy to come to that conclusion.
Oh, I hope it didn’t sound like I was arguing with you. Your post was totally reasonable. I’m just venting at the subject and the state of the world. :)
I really hate the “em-dash = AI” myth. I’ve probably been typing em-dashes since before half of y’all were born. I am not a
catbot. I will not cede the em-dash to AI!Yeah seriously, I use em dashes all the time too so I guess I’m a bot now too.
Account with no comments = suspicious af
I tested one AI detector and it said 100% AI. Then another one said 0% AI.
So probably somewhere in the middle I guess.
