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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Man, I haven't thought about Symfony in awhile.

I took a job at a subcontracting about 9 years ago, where I was mostly doing Node.js work, but there were some projects using Symfony, and even after using it on/off for a month, I have to say I never really "got" it. I could tell there's something there that's fairly cool, but I never really was able to wrap my head around all the folders.

I've become a way better programmer since then, so I have thought about trying it out again, but nothing in my day job uses PHP anymore, and I've moved away from web since then.

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I really enjoyed using Symfony for a lot of years.

The frameworks around before, Zend & CodeIgniter, were flawed in my opinion and Symfony was a breath of fresh air. More recently though, it feels like Laravel is doing a better job at letting people just get on with building a website.

Personally I think Symfony (and digging around its source) helped me become a far better software developer. It wasn't perfect, but it was awesome at the time. I built some really cool applications with it early on. Over ten years ago now!

No doubt about it though, some very talented people contributed to that project and I imagine they still do. Symfony was one of the lights in the dark if you ask me; PHP could be a very ugly thing at the time, but it proved that you could do great things with it by applying good practices and being diligent about reviewing and improving designs.

One of the things that blew me away (I was pretty green at the time) was when they made all of Symfony modular, and other frameworks began consuming their components. The portability of all of it was so impressing and inspiring to me back then.

Anyway, plenty of ways to criticize PHP and Symfony, but I think they did a stellar job. I built my career on that stuff. I haven't actually looked at it in quite a while, though.

To be fair, Zend and CodeIgniter had to juggle operating between PHP4/5 at the same time. The object model in PHP4 was mostly incomplete and just syntactic sugar. It also did some oddball things like flip-flop pass-by-value/reference.

I remember Zend also heavily relied on Singletons, which brought all kind of limitations

Ahh yes. PHP 4 support was a big thing for CodeIgniter.

I would love for you to try this one and hear your feedback:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

It takes the best ideas from CodeIgniter, Symfony, Kohana, Drupal and Doctrine…

I guess sf value in only understood in historical context. Compared to wordpress and ad-hoc code it was structured. Think jquery vs react I guess.

Symfony seems to be going strong still other than this issue.

Laravel is the other big MVC framework for PHP.

Just remembered, doesn't Laravel use a lot of Symfony components? If that's true then I have used it a bit since 2013, if only indirectly.

Yes: https://packagist.org/packages/laravel/framework

Still does, although you really don't notice while programming.

Isn’t laravel so alien, that they’re called laravel devs rather than php devs?

Yii seems to have its fans in that space. I know CraftCMS loves it.

CakePHP is also quite active and popular.

That was quite popular a while back also. I tried to pick it up when I first got into web development and never really understood it (didn't really understand MVC at all) and started using CodeIgniter (which is also still going) instead which seemed more straight forward - although used it more like VC rather than MVC haha.

Quite nice to see they're all going.

> but I never really was able to wrap my head around all the folders

Modern Symfony changed a lot about directory structures, and no longer recommends to use bundles. Most things now are autowired.

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