Write Laravel, not PHP (feat. Aaron Francis) | 029

Lane and Aaron Francis sit down to talk about Laravel and PHP, and why everyone who uses them tends to make a lot of money. There seems to be something to avoiding the technical hype cycle and just shipping web apps that people want to use.

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[MrHopp]

Just downloaded Herd on Mac and got an app up and running in 10 minutes. Excited to build something with Laravel. Awesome episode!

[poggybitz]

"Telling a fish water is weird" lmao. Aaron is super funny and very articulate. Thank you Lane for this amazing podcast.

I'm in favor of static-typed languages like Go and Rust.
However, I can say that I appreciate languages like PHP for writing scripts or some particular HTTP tasks for example instead of Javascript.
The reason is that writing PHP code (v8) feels to me more succinct than writing plain JS or indentation-based languages like Python or Ruby.
That is because PHP has improved a lot its syntax, performance and added support for strict typing. Francis has a nice video about PHP's built-in features enums, pattern matching, closures, etc.
Although PHP is single-threaded, if you want to do multi-thread PHP stuff, you have C extensions like Swoole.
Or if you are worried about performance, the compiler team is working to get a new JIT for PHP to optimize it even better in the future.
So IMO PHP is fairly decent at this point, so why not give a try?

[rysw]

My company has used PHP for a long time, and we’ll be gradually migrating new applications to go over the next few years.

It might sound a little odd but they are more similar than you might think by the criteria that are most important to us.

1. Despite what the guest says, they are both “batteries included” languages. Built into both languages are utilities for dealing with JSON, SQL databases, making HTTP requests, regex, email, etc. If third-party frameworks aren’t an option for you, you can roll your own pretty easily.
2. Both value backwards compatibility. In golang they have their compatibility promise. In PHP you can get a 15 year old application running with only minor changes generally.
3. The ecosystem. This is largely a product of the first two items, but both languages do have a good ecosystem. Composer and go get are the two best package management solutions I’ve used by a pretty wide margin.

Syntax, performance, programming paradigms, and even static typing obviously make some difference in how you use a programming language, but their impact for many (most?) use cases is completely overshadowed by broader concerns.

[overholted]

I'm thankful for the lack of "side quests" in PHP. JS is a nightmare to wade through right now as a beginner. For me, it's an easy choice. Laravel and Vue.

[tyu]

Talking about frameworks in JS land - yes Next.js doesn't compare to Rails and Laravel, but there IS a JS framework that's trying to be like that - it's called Adonis. It comes with auth, database, file storage, etc. Unfortunately the community and publicity is just nowhere near other JS frameworks for some reason. There's also Nest.js, but Adonis is a lot closer to those full-featured frameworks.

[LukasRotermund]

37:51 I would disagree in the sense that I use Golang not because I want to be able to handle 100, 000 requests per second, which would be cool, but rather to drastically reduce CPU time and memory usage. After all, CPU time and memory are exactly what I end up paying for with cloud computing. And when Laravel advertises Severless for performance, just like JS/Node, I find that a bit dubious, because it ends up costing quite a bit when the credits are used up.

[DarenC]

Hah! I use PHP as a templating language all the time! The CMS we use is written in Java, but we used it to produce PHP scripts. 😂 None of this front controller routing stuff, just an index.php in every directory. Bish, bash, bosh, job's a good 'un!

[sentient_carbon]

I can relate with the disgust at 51:26.
I'm a big php fan, but last week I was using a standard function, array_merge, which you'd think it merges arrays, right?
Here's the kicker: if you try to merge arrays with numeric keys, it actually behaves as an append! That was a fun hour.

[code-island]

I cant even tell how this conversation was fantastic, you both are really good speakers. Im getting comfortable with laravel ecosystem and very happy with the productivity

[aimperialdesign]

Ah! I already followed Aaron Francis Youtube before!

Now follow this channel too. Keep it up!!!

[gabrielbahash]

Wow this debate really clarified the vs. framework discussion

[Jacek]

Interesting chat, but:

I don't think you guys know what static vs dynamic typing is.

"We don't have huge amorphous arrays that we pass in PHP" - what? It's the exact thing I see most of the time.

[AndreiTelteu]

I think of typescript as just an easier documentation tool.
When I don't care `as any` is my friend, and on important stuff just type a small type declaration, no big deal. `strict: false` always

[olivier]

Best explanation of what really laravel is.🎉

[AHN]

Raw PHP is perfectly fine, you can search the database in a couple of lines and create the result on the fly, no extra files, no library, no nothing, what's wrong with echo? is shameful to use it? is way cooler to have 1000 packages to do the same in other way? which they will have dependency problems? and you will be executing other persons code which could have virus?. If you have a big project is better to use a framework, I use svelte and GO lately, but I don't forget that for some cases PHP is way superior.

[frnjtt-pnwj]

Great content!! very insightful for beginners

[woodmanmade]

Aaron basically saying he likes types (class instances) but not the syntax

TS is clunky but we use it often for the same reasons he uses classes in PHP: so we know what we're working with

And JS has an unfair aversion to using classes otherwise I think it would look quite similar at the end of the day

[JLarky]

19:44 I enjoyed how he repeated "7000 engineers working on React" twice, given that React team has like 10 people and Facebook used to be 100% written in PHP 😂

[bradtshortridge]

Laravel is just good, it works, it scales nicely for us, love it.