[code_runner]

in my experience, symfony looked like a massive, old, gross, enterprisy solution... laravel got as far out of my way as it could and had absolutely unbelievable documentation.

I am not a php person, but was on a php project and we were trying to run absolutely as fast as we could.... and laravel let us do that very effectively. If i was a php greybeard or something maybe I would've preferred symfony... but looking at our legacy symphony system compared to the laravel system we stood up and replace it.... I cannot imagine making a different choice

[throitallaway]

Yes, and at this point Laravel has a healthy ecosystem built up around it. There's a large community, tons of plugins available, and professional support for it.

[9dev]

If there’s one thing I hate about Laravel, it’s the docs. Some things are documented, arbitrary others aren’t; many APIs offer multiple aliases or equivalent ways to solve the same problem, and the docs use them interchangeably. Sometimes there’s multiple paragraphs for an obvious feature, but a single sentence for something complicated, and you’ll have to try for yourself to find out how it behaves.

[thomaslord]

It's been interesting seeing several comments like this in the comments, since Laravel's docs may be one of the most highly-praised aspects of the framework. I suspect the divide may be that newer developers get everything they need explained in the docs in clear language, but the more advanced stuff requires some digging.

I use Laravel personally, and I've definitely seen both sides of this myself. For basic "happy-path" API reference, the docs are great. If I really need to understand how the framework is doing something, I pretty much always end up diving into the code. Unfortunately the heavy use of Facades can sometimes make it annoying to find the underlying code.

[code_runner]

That’s fair in certain parts. I like the balance they struck (at the time at least) of not super in the weeds but not high level tutorial mode. A few things around their orm specifically were a little confusing or sparse at times if memory serves