Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

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There's a lot of popular examples of more or less abandoning the old ways, but the old ways still work.

I'm of the strong opinion that modern PHP with frameworks and auto-include and a ton of modelling is the wrong way to do it, but everyone else can do it that way, and I can still do things the old way and I can be happy.

PHP has this amazingly zen model of computing. At the end of the request, everything is thrown away to start fresh. This means anything you don't output is garbage. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to make sculptural models of your data and page structure only to throw them away. It's best to keep things simple.

There's some times and places where it makes sense to use more features, but starting with a kitchen sink framework makes it very hard to get simple where it's needed, but you can always pull in a little bit of something more complex into a simple thing.

You know, I kind of agree with you. When using Laravel I felt a lot of the time I was fighting against PHP rather than leveraging it. Back in the 'old' days when I was using PHP4 in the way you describe, PHP made sense as a choice compared to, say Python, for certain use cases. Today, I have a hard time coming up with an argument why using modern PHP and Laravel makes more sense than Rails or Django. Maybe we need a post-modern PHP movement focusing on bringing PHP back to its roots.

> Today, I have a hard time coming up with an argument why using modern PHP and Laravel makes more sense than Rails or Django. Maybe we need a post-modern PHP movement focusing on bringing PHP back to its roots.

Over Django: - Because if not doing SPAs, it provides infinitely better tools for the frontend, such as an integrated assets pipeline, a good template language with componetisation support - Because it is faster - Because during development every change is not a restart - Because it has an integrated queue system - Because you have popular frontend solutions such as Livewire

The only better thing I've found in Django is the admin.

Over Rails: - Because it is faster - Because PHP is far, far, far more popular tan Ruby - Because it has integrated authentication - Because it is easier to hire for

just some reasons from the top of my mind. I don't have a ton of experience with Rails and I think it is still great, but IMHO Laravel is better. I have worked with Django for about 10 years, and other than the Admin, I don't miss anything when working with Laravel. Language wise PHP vs Python is just syntax, I don't care as both ecosystems are pretty healthy.

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