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Comment by conradk | Hacker News Reader

Feels good to see a JS lib last that long and still be actively maintained, deprecating obsolete features and adapting to the new ways we use our browsers without breaking BC (or else explaining how to migrate).

Coming from Symfony (PHP), this just feels right: keep moving but make it easy to follow along.

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Is this a Symphony thing or are external dependencies significantly more reliable in the PHP ecosystem in general? Last time I wrote PHP was 9 years ago and those times everyone I knew just copy-pasted all the external code they found. I know that package managers are the thing now and I'm using nuget for my .NET projects (and npm, which is a must if you do any front-end dev), however, I feel like I'm having more dependency management issues than the good ol'days in spite of using a language with static type checking.

I'm not saying "vendor everything" but maybe some vendoring helps, especially when every package author seems like they've taken the philosophy of "doing one thing, doing it well and breaking everything on every update".

I find external dependencies much more reliable in the PHP world than JS. Most packages try to follow semver. Composer is one of the best dependency manager tools I've used and you can easily lock down dependency versions so you can install from a state which you know works.

People hate on PHP but there are a lot of quality packages out there and Composer is definitely considered best practice by most developers now.

The Symphony team are extremely good at moving forwards while not breaking everything behind them, they also have (frankly compared to nearly everyone) insanely good documentation.

I'm primarily a Laravel user (it's a better fit for the stuff we do) but I have huge respect for the Symfony guys as their components make PHP much nicer to work in.

I would say it is particularly true for Symfony, but other package maintainers, like Tailor Otwell for the Laravel framework, do an impressive job at documenting how to upgrade to newer versions and keeping BC to a minimum.

For instance, I just recently upgraded from Symfony 2.7 to 2.8. The upgrade path was pretty much "Remove all deprecated warnings, upgrade your Symfony package, done". The same upgrade path is used from Symfony 2.8 to 3.0, which makes it really easy to upgrade.

Symfony, as most PHP dependencies, can be installed via the "composer" package manager, which is pretty much the only package manager that is used in the PHP community, it seems. As dchesterton says, it is a very good piece of software.

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