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If you want to talk about potentially irrational reasons to be put off Laravel: when picking a framework I ended up going with Zend over Laravel mostly due to t

by munk-a 5y ago

If you want to talk about potentially irrational reasons to be put off Laravel: when picking a framework I ended up going with Zend over Laravel mostly due to the modularity of the former... but also because the wide prevalence of Laracasts made me concerned that written documentation would be difficult to use and the documentation space of the framework would slowly migrate to being half-out-of-date video and audio snippets that slowly became more and more misleading and inapplicable without being updated due to a lack of motivation.

tnorthcutt 5y ago
FWIW that hasn't been my experience at all. The documentation is great and well maintained. The repo is public and you can see all changes here: https://github.com/laravel/docs https://github.com/laravel/docs
- munk-a 5y ago
  I made this decision about four years ago and while the documentation was well maintained at the time I was concerned that the Laracasts would be unmaintained and become a source of confusion that talked about no longer present features. I was mostly afraid about the primary problem with over-documentation: you're introducing a maintenance cost which, if you ever stop paying, ends up quickly causing more harm than never having had the documentation in the first place. Here[1], for instance, is someone in this very response thread talking about how the core getting started Laracasts are out of date and they're confused which documentation they should reference. This will probably be addressed pretty soon (see the comment) but I think this is a very real danger with promising to deliver non-text based documentation. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261801
  - hhda 5y ago
    Laravel 9 was released today (hence this thread) - Laravel 8 is the major version that came out directly before Laravel 9. Further, Laravel 9 is essentially Laravel 8 with a bump to the dependencies, with most higher impact changes coming as a result of those dependencies being updated[1]. The Laravel 8 From Scratch series has videos as recently as August[2], with the What's New in Laravel 9 series already having 11 videos[3], with the most recent posted yesterday. The Laracasts video series are still very much actively updated (with Jeffrey, who runs it adding new teachers in the last year). And Laracasts is a 3rd party learning resource anyway, with the first party docs all being well maintained. 1. https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/upgrade https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/upgrade 2. https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-8-from-scratch/episodes/70 https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-8-from-scratch/episodes... 3. https://laracasts.com/series/whats-new-in-laravel-9 https://laracasts.com/series/whats-new-in-laravel-9
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I think it's safe to view Laracasts as being "sold" as part of the documentation officially accessible - and documentation should be ready before a release is pushed into public release. I absolutely sympathize if I've got the wrong impression of Laracasts (though maybe they should be less frequently promoted by Laravel itself if that's the case) and I completely understand that it takes time to record updated audio-visual tutorials... but that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - those prominent audio-visual tutorials existing and being pretty officially associated with Laravel means that new users trying to learn the system have windows where the documentation is confusing and out of date. It seems like an unnecessary risk to have adopted given that it's not at all standard in the industry - sometimes language designers will give a version specific tutorial but they're understood to be unmaintained with the docos being the official source... Laracasts are a very different thing which appear to be mostly working, but seem really likely to dramatically and suddenly become more of a danger than a benefit. One parallel I would draw on is the community effort, when PHP 5.3 or 5.4 came out, to purge all the terrible advice from StackOverflow. PHP had an issue, its documentation on php.net was fine and followed best practices, but the StackOverflow answers were often _terrible_ like - this will cause a big gaping hole in your security instantly terrible. It took a significant amount of effort to delete or properly answer these sources and since that happened the reputation of PHP has hugely improved. Bad documentation existing is worse than no documentation existing (but please don't take this as an excuse to not comment your code, just be conservative in your comments and keep it to a level you can actually afford to maintain).
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
That's not super irrational. :) Laravel does seem to be keeping up with their written documentation, although it's also occasionally an example of their "See how great Laravel is? See? See?" style.
stef25 5y ago
Are there any decent docs for Zend at all? I struggled with it for years. Simple "how do I ..." questions would just bring up nothing. Not from the docs, nor anywhere else on the web. Any solution I'd find wouldn't work in my case because other parts of my app were built in some incompatible way. The Laravel docs on the other hand are the best I've ever seen and there's a huge amount of community driven guides that are mostly decent too.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Zend has had some issues in that Zend1 and Zend2 were essentially different frameworks since Zend1 was built before namespacing was implemented. Whenever googling I'll include zf1, zf2, zf3 or laminas in the query to make sure I'm looking at the right version. The official documentation[1] itself is pretty good and has been since zf2 though, since laminas/zend has always been extremely modular, there aren't a lot of assumptions around what other components you're using, so most of the component documentation is pretty self contained. There are also resources like the skeleton application[2] that can be good places to begin if you're starting fresh. 1. https://docs.laminas.dev/ https://docs.laminas.dev/ 2. https://docs.laminas.dev/tutorials/getting-started/skeleton-application/ https://docs.laminas.dev/tutorials/getting-started/skeleton-...

by munk-a 5y ago

tnorthcutt 5y ago

FWIW that hasn't been my experience at all. The documentation is great and well maintained. The repo is public and you can see all changes here: https://github.com/laravel/docs https://github.com/laravel/docs

munk-a 5y ago
I made this decision about four years ago and while the documentation was well maintained at the time I was concerned that the Laracasts would be unmaintained and become a source of confusion that talked about no longer present features. I was mostly afraid about the primary problem with over-documentation: you're introducing a maintenance cost which, if you ever stop paying, ends up quickly causing more harm than never having had the documentation in the first place. Here[1], for instance, is someone in this very response thread talking about how the core getting started Laracasts are out of date and they're confused which documentation they should reference. This will probably be addressed pretty soon (see the comment) but I think this is a very real danger with promising to deliver non-text based documentation. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261801
- hhda 5y ago
  Laravel 9 was released today (hence this thread) - Laravel 8 is the major version that came out directly before Laravel 9. Further, Laravel 9 is essentially Laravel 8 with a bump to the dependencies, with most higher impact changes coming as a result of those dependencies being updated[1]. The Laravel 8 From Scratch series has videos as recently as August[2], with the What's New in Laravel 9 series already having 11 videos[3], with the most recent posted yesterday. The Laracasts video series are still very much actively updated (with Jeffrey, who runs it adding new teachers in the last year). And Laracasts is a 3rd party learning resource anyway, with the first party docs all being well maintained. 1. https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/upgrade https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/upgrade 2. https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-8-from-scratch/episodes/70 https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-8-from-scratch/episodes... 3. https://laracasts.com/series/whats-new-in-laravel-9 https://laracasts.com/series/whats-new-in-laravel-9
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I think it's safe to view Laracasts as being "sold" as part of the documentation officially accessible - and documentation should be ready before a release is pushed into public release. I absolutely sympathize if I've got the wrong impression of Laracasts (though maybe they should be less frequently promoted by Laravel itself if that's the case) and I completely understand that it takes time to record updated audio-visual tutorials... but that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - those prominent audio-visual tutorials existing and being pretty officially associated with Laravel means that new users trying to learn the system have windows where the documentation is confusing and out of date. It seems like an unnecessary risk to have adopted given that it's not at all standard in the industry - sometimes language designers will give a version specific tutorial but they're understood to be unmaintained with the docos being the official source... Laracasts are a very different thing which appear to be mostly working, but seem really likely to dramatically and suddenly become more of a danger than a benefit. One parallel I would draw on is the community effort, when PHP 5.3 or 5.4 came out, to purge all the terrible advice from StackOverflow. PHP had an issue, its documentation on php.net was fine and followed best practices, but the StackOverflow answers were often _terrible_ like - this will cause a big gaping hole in your security instantly terrible. It took a significant amount of effort to delete or properly answer these sources and since that happened the reputation of PHP has hugely improved. Bad documentation existing is worse than no documentation existing (but please don't take this as an excuse to not comment your code, just be conservative in your comments and keep it to a level you can actually afford to maintain).

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

That's not super irrational. :) Laravel does seem to be keeping up with their written documentation, although it's also occasionally an example of their "See how great Laravel is? See? See?" style.

stef25 5y ago

Are there any decent docs for Zend at all? I struggled with it for years. Simple "how do I ..." questions would just bring up nothing. Not from the docs, nor anywhere else on the web. Any solution I'd find wouldn't work in my case because other parts of my app were built in some incompatible way. The Laravel docs on the other hand are the best I've ever seen and there's a huge amount of community driven guides that are mostly decent too.

munk-a 5y ago
Zend has had some issues in that Zend1 and Zend2 were essentially different frameworks since Zend1 was built before namespacing was implemented. Whenever googling I'll include zf1, zf2, zf3 or laminas in the query to make sure I'm looking at the right version. The official documentation[1] itself is pretty good and has been since zf2 though, since laminas/zend has always been extremely modular, there aren't a lot of assumptions around what other components you're using, so most of the component documentation is pretty self contained. There are also resources like the skeleton application[2] that can be good places to begin if you're starting fresh. 1. https://docs.laminas.dev/ https://docs.laminas.dev/ 2. https://docs.laminas.dev/tutorials/getting-started/skeleton-application/ https://docs.laminas.dev/tutorials/getting-started/skeleton-...