> Laravel has to jump through a lot of hoops behind the scenes to do what it does, leaving you with a framework that isn't particularly nimble and design patter

> Laravel has to jump through a lot of hoops behind the scenes to do what it does, leaving you with a framework that isn't particularly nimble and design patterns that often aren't particularly applicable to the rest of the PHP world. And tell me, do you use React? Talk about jumping through hoops just to print HTMl. Personally I'm very glad Laravel was written in PHP, because: 1) you can still use raw PHP in the templates if you wish. 2) PHP Traits allow a very interesting form of polymorphism and code-reuse which is especially suited to the kind of business logic you find in web apps. 3) PHP is very much a C-inspired language that was built ONLY for the web, so you get access to a lot of low-level constructs and a "baremetal" paradigm (passthroughs like system() for bash scripts with seamless handling of STDIN/STDOUT) plus a solid standard library for the web. The PHP standard lib supports everything you need to write HTTP servers: curl_setopt, parse_url, FFI for calling C functions for performance-sensitive code, date/time/number/currency formatting, global variables for cookies and sessions, etc. all out of the box. For web apps, I'll take PHP over NodeJS/Ruby/Python any day of the week.