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.
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. :)
Yeah seriously, I use em dashes all the time too so I guess I’m a bot now too.