[Joeri]

I switched jobs, and started with Symfony 3. The thing felt like some Java framework, but poorly documented and harder to use than it should be. It had lots and lots of setup code done before handling every request. There's a whole DI framework with it's own tons of setup code for every component.

This is also the overarching feeling I get from the big PHP frameworks: Java envy. They picked an architecture which is perfectly sensible in Java, but slow by design in PHP. You also notice this in the language features being added, where gradually PHP is turning into Java. On the Java side instead there is Scala envy, with Java slowly turning into Scala.

I don't mind PHP taking good ideas from Java though, PHP 7.x is much improved and the community overall seems to be moving in the right direction: take the good ideas from Java, without taking on the worst excesses.

[cutler]

Drupal and Symfony have inherited the worst excesses of Java's AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBuilderContainer culture. Laravel and Symfony also have a preference for docsting annotations which are even worse than Java.