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Comment by ianhawes | Hacker News Reader

Having watched Laravel 5 throughout development, I'm personally unhappy with the fact that most of the nice features of Laravel have been removed.

For example, the default version of Laravel 4.x shipped with the "Whoops" PHP stack trace view, which is far superior to the L5-default Symfony stack trace view. Other features were removed too, including the HTML library. Blade tags were changed for no reason.

Overall, it feels like instead of adding requested features, Taylor decided to redesign the architecture for no reason.

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FUD.

The "architecture" change is the bootstrap repository, which has a new folder structure. I know, scary stuff! Folders!

The "architecture" has some enhancements to middleware and fleshing out events/commands to a "command bus". Basically, you get more sugar on top of the (mostly) same architecture.

Whoops caused a lot of headaches behind the scenes, and did stupid things like convert ALL http error responses to 500, even on a 404 error (which showed up in Whoops, as HTTP errors are converted to exceptions within Symfony's HTTP stack).

Blade tags have one new tag, and the old ones still works.

This point might be the subjective one - HTML library. HTML libraries create an enormous amount of support for people's edge cases and generally are better pushed out as a third-party add on to suit your needs. The upgrade guide explains how you can add them back in if you want. https://github.com/illuminate/html

That's a shitty explanation for dropping Whoops. The first time I remember the discussion of it being dropped got brought up was because of a bug in the framework relating to the assets, where Taylor didn't hesitate to blame Whoops and deleted comments on Github pointing out that the problem was actually in his own code.

It would've been super easy to add some code that sets the HTTP code for Whoops's response if that was the problem - but the fact is you should demand your framework users define their own 404 handlers.

The old Blade tags now escape all HTML, that hardly counts as working.

You can easily change the config to make the Blade tags work as they previously did. I'm unhappy about this change as well though. It's very reminiscent of some design decisions PHP has taken:

1. Create feature X.

2. Users don't understand feature X, and use it when they should be using feature Y (for safety.)

3. Update the API so that feature X does what feature Y did, and create feature Z that now does what feature X did.

4. Old users using feature X incorrectly are now protected, while users who correctly used feature X must now convert to feature Z.

Not being familiar with Laravell, having a look at[1], I see what you mean:

> In Laravel 4 Blade included the following two styles: {{ and {{{. > The double curly bracket was a raw echo and the triple curly bracket escaped. > > Now both the double and triple curly brackets escape the variable and a new {!! $var !!} is for raw.

I'd argue that having unescaped output be shorter/easier than escaped output was probably a design error in earlier versions -- but I'm not sure I like the "fix"... If it was a green-field design, I must admit I like the "danger!"-feel that unescaped output has in L5 though.

[1] https://laravel-news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/

https://plus.google.com/events/ctgh4ss551t10kg4fktqood9t3o, about 12:30 in on why removed Whoops.

The single maintainer just didn't want to maintain them, which goes to show how Laravel really just is his personal project that got really popular, not a community-driven effort.

IMO, that fact has helped make Laravel successful. Sometimes, software projects benefit from a benevolent dictator rather than design-by-committee.

I don't know the reasoning behind the decision to not use Whoops by default, but I considered the beautiful and informative error pages to be a nice trait of Laravel that I will miss. It is also a feature that almost anyone who has used Laravel has come in contact with, so I am sure that it will be widely missed. I remember a non-developer coworker who was using Laravel 4.x for the first time commenting on how it was one of their favorite features.

Adding it back should be trivial http://mattstauffer.co/blog/bringing-whoops-back-to-laravel-...

I usually add the Raven PHP client [https://github.com/getsentry/raven-php] to report errors to Sentry when starting a new project and will likely do the same with Whoops by default.

HTML library is now optional, more info on that here also here you will find why the blade tags have changed: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/upgrade#upgrade-5.0

Whoops stack trace: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/wh...

Can we stop complaining? I see a ton of improvements and nicer features than the ones you are talking about in this new release.

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