Why Laravel?

After launching Linesbox, I received a lot of questions about why I chose to write the tool with PHP and Laravel in particular. I was actually surprised to receive so many questions about this topi...

After launching Linesbox, I received a lot of questions about why I chose to write the tool with PHP and Laravel in particular. I was actually surprised to receive so many questions about this topic because I consider that a language does not matter - only counts what you do with it.

In this post I'll share why I chose PHP and Laravel and the difficulties I had to overcome to build the first version of the product. This post is not meant to start a war between languages.

PHP has an interesting history. A lot of great web developers, who probably do not use PHP anymore, have learned the basics of programing with it. It was so simple to use and get started with, and while it wasn't an elegant language, it paved the way for making a career in web development. Then over time, PHP became less loved, to the point where it was almost shameful to use PHP or even say in meetups that your company was using it. Other languages, arguably more elegant, gain a lot of popularity (Python, Ruby) thanks to wonderful frameworks built upon them. At the same time, new PHP frameworks appeared. Symfony for instance. But Symfony was still hard to learn and use. And then PHP died. Or so that's what people said, ignoring apparently the fact that a lot of business was still using it and loving it. Then PHP 5.5 was created, followed by PHP 7, and a new framework with a weird name appeared, Laravel. And things changed entirely in people's mindset. PHP is still not as elegant as other popular languages, but things got a lot better. It became also fast.

But regardless of this, PHP is still the language people love to hate, especially on Hacker News. They say PHP is not scalable. This is probably why Facebook and Mailchimp, amongst other big names, use PHP today, at great scale.