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Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

I have not written a new PHP app in years but recently I had a look at the latest and greatest from the PHP community and its pretty good. The frameworks and tooling look about as good as you will get anywhere and PHP appears to be fast now.

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As someone who was about to ditch the PHP ecosystem 6 years ago for something like Rails... frameworks like Laravel absolutely changed the PHP ecosystem.

Also since the release of PHP 7.0, core development seems to have really picked up with good stuff in every release (7.3 was just released a few months ago).

I've used both Rails and Laravel fairly extensively. The Psy shell and Laravel collections library are quite nice, but not quite as versatile as Rails/pry. However, Ruby has a long way to go to catch up to the PHP interpreter's performance.

I just do not understand the fascination with Laravel. When the first version of Laravel was released Symfony was already lightyears ahead.

The only thing Laravel had going for it was that you could take more shortcuts, and it was a pain to integrate into any IDE if you wanted decent autocompletion.

I haven't touched symphony from 1.2 but laravel was a lot simpler to use, especially for begginers. no stupid yaml files, the need to definine everything in yaml before. simpler orm and so on.

When people talk about symfony now they usually mean version 2. Symfony 1 is not comparable to Laravel.

The main thing Laravel had going for it was good marketing.

I disagree. Laravel is much less verbose than Symfony and tries to optimize for developer happiness. Couple that with a kick ass video tutorials site (laracast.com) and that Laravel was started at the fall of CodeIgniter giving it a great boost in users.

Laravel is not what it used to be either -- Laravel 5 is far more capable/usable than Rails or Django. It's ecosystem is vaster, much stronger community, better docs, faster -- pretty much every state it's better than it's competitors.

Not an end-all be-all, but worth noting: https://github.com/topics/framework

Laravel may, may be better than Rails. But Django is better still.

How so?

Symfony and Laravel are really nice.

It's still a horrible abomination of a language that invites bugs and requires A LOT of care to not produce buggy code, though.

It is getting better though. I'm hoping that 8.0 can introduce some real BC breaks that will clean up the mess the language has created over the years.

Does it? If you declare strict, use strict comparison operators and typehint your arguments and returns, what more care do you need? These are not particularly onerous, the strict declaration is trivially templateable in any editor as it's the first line, you'd write types in any language and getting used to only use === !== and forget == and != is ... easy?

Type declarations definitely help a lot, but:

* touching basically any standard library function negates a lot of the benefit

* silent coercion still happens everywhere inside a function body

Even if strict comparison, you have to spend a lot of code validating the input and it's really easy to forget an edge case.

What's the equivalent of === for < and > in PHP?

Use < and > for numbers and strcmp for strings. A strict type > would be very weird because besides returning TRUE and FALSE it'd need to throw a TypeError, I guess?

>A strict type > would be very weird because besides returning TRUE and FALSE it'd need to throw a TypeError, I guess?

Yes, which would make it behave exactly like probably every language with strong runtime typechecks. Very weird indeed. It's obviously much more preferable that the code sometimes does the wrong thing without warning.

And of course with static typing, it would be extremely weird since the code wouldn't even pass the compiler!

I don't think the snark in this response is super helpful; a simple "Yes, throw a TypeError when the types are incorrect" would have sufficed.

Congratulations for being the last straw. I'm getting out of this site for good.

There is an absolutely phenomenal static analyser for PHP called enhanced inspections EA (free version and commercial very) that will flag == when === should be more appropriate (among many other things).

For people not using Intellij (or wanting a tool that can be used as part of commit/deploy setup there is phan which is well executed).

I've mocked PHP for a long time (been using it for various day jobs for over a decade) but they've made massive strides in the last 2-3 years to the extent where used properly it's approach 'not a bad' language status.

> what more care do you need?

1. Generic typehints, for one. Typehinting half the methods as returning a generic `array` is not fun.

2. And that's before you even remember that PHP's array is both a vector and a hashmap, so you need to install a PECL extension or a third-party library to get proper Map/Sequence/etc.

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