6 ms·

I have not written a new PHP app in years but recently I had a look at the latest and greatest from the PHP community and its pretty good. The frameworks and to

• tomschlick 8y ago
  As someone who was about to ditch the PHP ecosystem 6 years ago for something like Rails... frameworks like Laravel absolutely changed the PHP ecosystem. Also since the release of PHP 7.0, core development seems to have really picked up with good stuff in every release (7.3 was just released a few months ago).
  • sethrin 8y ago
    I've used both Rails and Laravel fairly extensively. The Psy shell and Laravel collections library are quite nice, but not quite as versatile as Rails/pry. However, Ruby has a long way to go to catch up to the PHP interpreter's performance.
  • Aeolun 8y ago
    I just do not understand the fascination with Laravel. When the first version of Laravel was released Symfony was already lightyears ahead. The only thing Laravel had going for it was that you could take more shortcuts, and it was a pain to integrate into any IDE if you wanted decent autocompletion.
    • disiplus 8y ago
      I haven't touched symphony from 1.2 but laravel was a lot simpler to use, especially for begginers. no stupid yaml files, the need to definine everything in yaml before. simpler orm and so on.
      • spdionis 8y ago
        When people talk about symfony now they usually mean version 2. Symfony 1 is not comparable to Laravel.
    • spdionis 8y ago
      The main thing Laravel had going for it was good marketing.
      • tomschlick 8y ago
        I disagree. Laravel is much less verbose than Symfony and tries to optimize for developer happiness. Couple that with a kick ass video tutorials site (laracast.com) and that Laravel was started at the fall of CodeIgniter giving it a great boost in users.
    • KerryJones 8y ago
      Laravel is not what it used to be either -- Laravel 5 is far more capable/usable than Rails or Django. It's ecosystem is vaster, much stronger community, better docs, faster -- pretty much every state it's better than it's competitors. Not an end-all be-all, but worth noting: https://github.com/topics/framework https://github.com/topics/framework
      • Aeolun 8y ago
        Laravel may, may be better than Rails. But Django is better still.
        • KerryJones 8y ago
          How so?
• the_duke 8y ago
  Symfony and Laravel are really nice. It's still a horrible abomination of a language that invites bugs and requires A LOT of care to not produce buggy code, though.
  • tomschlick 8y ago
    It is getting better though. I'm hoping that 8.0 can introduce some real BC breaks that will clean up the mess the language has created over the years.
  • chx 8y ago
    Does it? If you declare strict, use strict comparison operators and typehint your arguments and returns, what more care do you need? These are not particularly onerous, the strict declaration is trivially templateable in any editor as it's the first line, you'd write types in any language and getting used to only use === !== and forget == and != is ... easy?
    • the_duke 8y ago
      Type declarations definitely help a lot, but: * touching basically any standard library function negates a lot of the benefit * silent coercion still happens everywhere inside a function body Even if strict comparison, you have to spend a lot of code validating the input and it's really easy to forget an edge case.
    • vesak 8y ago
      What's the equivalent of === for < and > in PHP?
      • chx 8y ago
        Use < and > for numbers and strcmp for strings. A strict type > would be very weird because besides returning TRUE and FALSE it'd need to throw a TypeError, I guess?
        • vesak 8y ago