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Comment by notresidenter | Hacker News Reader

PHP and the ecosystem around it, especially Laravel, makes developers incredibly productive: everything is so damn easy.

Nothing comes close to it in Go, Ruby, JS (Node), Python; from what I've seen. Laravel is one step ahead.

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I worked with Laravel and trust me, it's a pain in the ass when you have a medium/big project. The "documentation" (more a how-to) is full of bad practices, the facade pattern makes it hard to refactor or change the underline logic, you can break the contract easily (it's just php annotations, not real type-hints), the ORM is a pain to test and has too much magic, you use strings to set the validation makes it hard to understand when it's not trivial, the request->input() takes query/body so you end up mixing everything and some clients use the API in various way, there is helpers to get the config/service anywhere (even in static methods) which makes it painful to test and refactor, etc. I strongly recommend to use Symfony instead, the documentation is great, the profiler is built-in, the cache is better (faster), it's type-hinted and strict, there is interfaces, it scales well because it's flexible and well thought.

> I worked with Laravel and trust me, it's a pain in the ass when you have a medium/big project

Every language is...

My thought on NodeJS is I've experienced incredible productivity with Astro web framework, as everything is written in TypeScript.

I'm familiar with Livewire and have used AlpineJS, but I plan to adopt Qwik (Resumability) as a component in Astro, which addresses frontend performance. One step ahead of others now that I don't have to maintain Go language as a backend which took me months to migrate to TypeScript for a medium size platform.

I'd love to see something like laravel/symfony in go/rust. If anyone is willing to give it a shot I would've switched yesterday

Honestly it’s pretty hard. We are talking about frameworks with decades of development. It’s not something that can be done by one developer, you need corporate levels of investments at least to bootstrap it.

Well, no, that's not really a fair assessment. Someone is quite literally doing "rails but for Rust" with loco: https://loco.rs

As far as I know, the bulk of this effort has been one developer pushing it along. I wouldn't personally use it but it _does_ exist.

It's also worth noting that these older frameworks all come from a different era of development - nowadays most newer devs seem to want to build microservice-after-microservice, where these don't quite fit into the picture.

They are doing it and I hope they succeed and prove me wrong but last time I checked Loco was still far from Rails.

I've thought about doing a Laravel-like framework in Go, but one of the superpower of PHP/Laravel _is_ the possibility to have very loose / no types, which gives a great DX when used correctly, but in Go, you'd have to interface{} so many things that the resulting code would be non idiomatic / not as performant as go can be.

And then, you'd need to have an ecosystem as strong as Laravel which... wow... would take a _lot_ of investments.

> Nothing comes close to it in Go, Ruby, JS (Node), Python; from what I've seen. Laravel is one step ahead.

I can't really agree with that when Express and Django exists in this world. But Laravel is indeed amazing piece of software

Express from Node? That's not even comparable. Express is a simple routing solution, Laravel is a framework packed with features.

Express is simple but it’s pretty barebones, nothing comparable to Django or Laravel.

But yeah Django is nearly perfect, my dream framework is Django officially typed in a world where the python community get its shit together with type checking.

We are not far but I miss having good IDE auto completion and not having errors in my IDE as a reliable source of confidence.

PHP is slowly gaining ground on strict typings and every update brings new features. It’s really fun to see losely typed methods over time being refactored to typed methods, giving you that slight peace of mind in every step. Big kudos to the PHP and Laravel community.

Express is not in the same category as Laravel, what gets closer to Laravel in the NodeJS world would be Adonis (that I know of). Express is essentially a modular router (for people that think that server-side JS is a good idea)

If you run `laravel new my-app`, you got an application with caching, database, queue, views, translations, whatever else you can think of, ready to use with things like Oauth / Payments / E2E Testing / Feature flags / Search... a command away.

You don't get that with Express, you don't get that with Django, from what I've seen (but I'd be very happy to be wrong!)

Django is comparable. A little harder to deploy (well we have docker now so who cares) but still incredibly productive.

I mean, with Django, literally just defining your database models in models.py and not touching anything else is enough to have a working application with a full featured admin backend with authentication already built in.

If you define your models correctly with the good constraints you are literally left with writing your HTML views and/or API endpoints, adding permissions and call it a production app.

I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

Python has been doing web frameworks for quite a while now - starting late 1990s with Zope & Plone.

> I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

I'm doing some Ruby for work and I hate it with passion every time i have to touch it.

Official tutorial-style documentation for Ruby is largely non-existstant (except for a book from 2002 that teaches outdated stuff from ruby 1.3). Learning ruby is 99% monkey learning, as in reading some random tutorial off the web and then doing some monkey-see-monkey-do. It's awful and it's frustrating.

Python on the other hand is extremely well documented:

* Tutorial: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html

* Standard library reference: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

* Language reference: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html

Guess which language is thriving and which is slowly losing relevance?

> I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

RoR is insanely productive.

I've worked with both, Laravel and Django, for many many years.

Laravel is miles ahead of Django, in every single aspect. The template system is incredible while the django one is stuck in the 90s. The integrated job queues, scheduling, asset bundling, etc, etc. And yes, you also have Admin interfaces for Laravel, both paid and free, and they're as good or even better depending how you look at them. Community is also a lot bigger which means more packages and better maintained.

Laravel is Rails clone afaik

java/kotlin with either spring boot or quarkus.

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