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Comment by code_runner | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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