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.
Python is a poor choice IMO. It’s just too slow, even for web servers. Everyone says “oh it’s IO bound or database bound; Python doesn’t matter”) but in my experience it does.
Better choices:
- Go - very easy. Build in web stuff. Fast. Trivial to deploy.
- Typescript, especially via something like Deno’s Fresh. Much faster than Python, better type checking, and best of all you can use TSX-based templates instead of shitty text-based ones like Jinja.
- Rust. Definitely the hardest option, but on the plus side you will learn Rust and that’s a big plus.
I just dipped toes into Rust for personal project and I definetly wouldn’t pick it up for web dev unless you have very very strict latency requirements or massive throughput. Too much hassle. C# is also a good option now that its cross platform.
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?
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