Laravel has taught me many things about maintainability, but it&#x27;s mostly &quot;don&#x27;t write code like Laravel&quot;. My favorite is how cache tagging was broken in Laravel, and there was a complete PR presented to fix it, but Taylor closed the PR without comment and just removed all mention of cache tagging from the documentation instead.

Made a transcript generated by whisper, for us who likes reading rather than listening :) Also added a summary by GPT 5 Pro for the lazies out there: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;victorb&#x2F;ef2550a55860023b9179dc8357759021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;victorb&#x2F;ef2550a55860023b9179dc835775...</a>

Laravel 3.2 was released in May 2012, so 13 years ago. Sounds like you should port the application off of Laravel since Laravel’s got an “evergreen”&#x2F;regular updates maintenance model. I’m not even sure that 13 year old PHP is still maintained FWIW. I’m struggling to think of a programming community that tries to achieve a “we will maintain this for decades” approach, maybe another reader knows of something.

&gt; The upgrade from Laravel 4 to 5 (released Oct 2013) is probably the biggest hurdle....Can confirm. We started on Laravel 4 and it languished at that version until someone in leadership agreed to get it updated to version 8, which seemed to mostly be about some APIs changing. (The configuration system changed quite a bit for example.) Further upgrades from 8 to 10 then 11 have been very quick. (Note that we don&#x27;t use Eloquent ORM so that wasn&#x27;t part of these upgrades.)

Laravel 3 and Laravel 4 were released in ~2012. The upgrade from Laravel 4 to 5 (released Oct 2013) is probably the biggest hurdle, but you can likely upgrade from Laravel 5 to Laravel 12 in a week or sooner with Laravel Shift.

Rails 2 to 3 was a bit more involved than others, also Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 !But ultimately it got better IMO, indeed.

Not a Ruby&#x2F;Rails person, but from a quick look there are still APIs named exactly the same between those versions. Very nice to seeOn the other hand, Laravel decided to change from snake_case to CamelCase between versions 3 and 4, just because. Literally 0% compatibility

We started on Rails 3.2 and on Rails 8 now. Some upgrades were harder than others, but they never warranted anything close a rewrite.

It&#x27;s on PHP 7.4, so between RHEL and CloudLinux there&#x27;s another few years left in it, before I weigh up rewrite vs another round of hacking modern PHP support into Laravel 3

Apparently version 3 was released in 2012 though.Is it even running on a still supported PHP version?

Still maintaining a Laravel 3 project. Barely made it 2 years before maintainability became a nightmare and the only upgrade path was complete rewrite. Projects written without an opinionated framework easily sail past 10 years of comfy maintainability

As someone who came to Laravel from WordPress, I had a massive hole in my abilities to understand larger systems as a whole. During my tenure in WordPress, I actually got pretty good at the web native parts of modern web development but my “backend” skills were mostly about passing arrays around and doing simple database operations. Basic concepts like MVC were totally foreign to me and I was reminded of this a few months ago when I chatted with an old friend about their experiences with Laravel after the drama in WP land a few months back. When I told him that Models were not anything special and you didn’t need to scaffold out a Model using Laravel to create your own class against an existing table, his mind was blown and I could see the gears starting to turn. Mind you, this is a very successful solopreneur with a thriving theme business&#x2F;platform and over a decade of experience; just that xp was in a domain set apart from the discipline of modern software engineering.I’m super happy to have spent that time learning how to work with constraints to build absolutely giant systems (had a stint with an agency that worked for big online publishers that are known for using WP…) but after seeing the other side, I’m also happy to be past that and onto different and more interesting things.

IMO, Symfony pushed for [better] standards and using a dependency manager are a couple of things.Drupal took their time but finally started using composer and a lot of their components were Symfony components.Wordpress just held their ground.

Laravel and Symfony is interesting, because Laravel sits on top of Symfony and releases of Laravel sometimes wait for releases of Symfony components.

I did PHP development for awhile, at 2 different places. One was a Laravel shop, the other was Symfony.My biggest takeaway is Laravel is fast to get up and going with and ship something, while Symfony actually scales and is far more easily maintainableIf I were to choose building an app I expect to last I’d choose Symfony every time

Laravel builds on Symfony so it is in some way natural that more real products&#x2F;applications are released based on Laravel than on pure Symfony. Laravel has more functions built in and more practical packages for real use cases. Developing a similar app based on Symfony would require much more work.

The Laravel and Symfony communities are culturally very different. Laravel (and Taylor) are very US-American, Symfony (and Fabien) very European, and it comes through in communication style and presentation. Laravel has a share of users building products to sell to other Laravel users; Symfony doesn&#x27;t. If I caricature, Laravel users are better at making money (as a Symfony user the social media presence looks like &quot;grifting&quot;); Symfony users at being architecture astronauts (and looking down on people &quot;getting things done&quot;).At a high level the WordPress community doesn&#x27;t mesh because of having the WordPress way of doing things, and having a history of writing for old versions of PHP years after others have moved on and told users to upgrade. The WordPress community is fragmented into separate sub-communities which again don&#x27;t mesh. There&#x27;s the users who only build sites with page builders and hardly know how to code, those whose goal is to sell copies of their paid plugin (or hosting services), and those with permission to make changes to WordPress itself.I&#x27;ve no recent experience of Drupal so can&#x27;t comment on them.

Wordpress is old school. The PHP of Laravel and Symfony is light years ahead of the stuff in Wordpress.Maybe they need to stay close to the metal based on the performance they need?

The Wordpress community doesn&#x27;t even mesh with the Wordpress community, let alone any other ones.

Technically, you could swap Eloquent for Doctrine which would solve the database issues but Laravel was built around using Eloquent and vice-versa, there’s very little documentation for using doctrine with laravel or using eloquent with symfony, it’d be easier to just use what grew up together.Laravel is more akin to rails with its rapid application development but rails does it better.

Symfony and Laravel are fundamentally ideologically opposed.Laravel is designed from the ground up to be used by junior developers who don&#x27;t care about pesky things like maintainability and scalability and just want to put out the minimum viable product as fast as possible, and with the least amount of work possible. It&#x27;s full of &quot;magic&quot; abstractions built with the primary purpose of making the code look pretty at a glance to the inexperienced, completely disregarding good programming practices and even essential language features in the process, the programming equivalent of lipstick on a pig. It markets itself to beginners as &quot;the magic framework that does everything for you&quot; and is as big as it is today purely due to successfully capturing a large percentage of that audience.Symfony goes in the complete opposite direction: it&#x27;s designed to be used by experienced developers to build maintainable, extensible applications while employing good programming practices. It encourages you to &quot;look under the hood&quot; and understand how things work instead of just telling you &quot;to do X, write Y&quot; without elaborating. It has many convenience features but they&#x27;re generally built on top of language features with good practices in mind instead of handwaving it all away. It&#x27;s very modular and allows you to extend and&#x2F;or replace almost every part of the framework with your own custom version if the included version isn&#x27;t suitable for your use case. And so on.One of the best examples of Symfony vs Laravel is the way database tables are mapped to PHP code. In Symfony, SQL tables are just PHP classes. To create a new table, you create a new class, add the columns you want as properties, add some attributes to tell the ORM how to map all of that to a table, and it&#x27;s done. Your database columns match your class properties, every time you query the database you get instances of that class and can use them as a proper objects with properly typed fields.Laravel, meanwhile, does none of that, your database tables are defined purely by the database itself at runtime, what they call &quot;Models&quot; are just empty classes that have the database columns injected into them at runtime as dynamic properties. You cannot know what properties your Model has just by looking at it, I believe you need a Laravel-specific IDE plugin just to autocomplete them. You&#x27;re essentially working with glorified associative arrays the whole time. This alone is a massive red flag that should make any experienced programmer avoid Laravel.Wordpress sits on its own little island as a big pile of legacy code that&#x27;s almost frozen in time, full of bad practices that no self-respecting developer wants to touch. No lipstick on this pig, it&#x27;s as ugly as it is obtuse. It&#x27;s still commonly used today because someone with zero programming knowledge can load up a bunch of plugins full of security holes and make a somewhat usable site that vaguely matches their vision, but using it for any new project more complex than a basic blog is generally seen as a mistake.Can&#x27;t speak for Drupal as I have no experience with it.

It was interesting to hear that Laravel, Drupal, Wordpress and Symfony communities do not mesh. I wonder why.

It sounds like some dynamic gain is happening every time he starts talking, and then after ~1 second it gets better. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a &quot;missing hardware&quot; issue, just turning down the gain would probably be enough, or tuning the software dynamics if he&#x27;s using that. Could also be that the podcaster tried doing some normalization across the entire podcast while mastering and fucked it up that way.

Also not sure what microphone was used but a pop filter would have helped.

Very poor audio quality, not listenable. Why do folks insist screaming into microphone and overloading the recording where it just nasty clipping?

&gt; There&#x27;s a reason why Laravel is more popular than Symfony.Yes, and that reason is being more beginner friendly at the cost of pretty much everything else. It&#x27;s not related to overall quality at all.

... Laravel uses Symfony components.Also, this is very regional.Here in Europe, actual, big projects that need to make money use Symfony, not Laravel.

More like:Lesson 1: Use the best tools available.There&#x27;s a reason why Laravel is more popular than Symfony.

Hah! You&#x27;re carbon dating yourself with this joke.

&quot;What 14 years of Sendmail told me about security&quot;

Laravel is using a outdated MVC model, its slow as hell and finally its purpose is basically to put lipstick on what is php.

Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability