| I would actually argue there's a good chance the person you're replying to is "doing it right": - they're using Composer packages - they're using the fairly well-documented, popular Fastroute for routing - they're using the well-documented, PSR-11-compliant PHP-DI dependency injection container - they're using the well-documented Swoole for async programming In other words, they're rolling their own framework not from scratch, but on top of well-understood components that largely follow -- and largely require programs that use them to follow -- what's considered to be "best practice" in the PHP world. I get that there's a lot of crap PHP out there, historically, and that frameworks have helped dramtatically reduce that. But it turns out you don't actually have to start with a framework in order to write well-structured, well-commented PHP code -- you just have to have a commitment to doing it. I'm working on my own PHP microproject right now and I'm pretty flagrantly violating some "PHP the Right Way" conventions; the project doesn't even Composer and -- horror of horrors -- the autoloader isn't technically compliant with PSR-4. I'll pause for everyone to recover from the fainting spell. I don't think anyone else is going to ever have to maintain this -- but I'm also pretty sure that when I'm finished, it will actually be more understandable and maintainable than some Symfony and Laravel projects I've worked on in the past. It's not the fault of those frameworks that people build inscrutable undocumented modules on top of them, but it still happens. And frankly, I understand why someone can appreciate Symfony and Laravel and friends and still say, "Wow, that's... just... a whole lot." (If you initialize a new Symfony 5 project, before you have written a single line of your own, your project is already at around 160K lines of code.) And they can look at microframeworks, especially modern we-must-comply-with-all-PHP-FIG-mandate ones, and say, "That isn't a whole lot, yet it kind of feels weirdly heavyweight for what comparatively little it does." > Please stop reinventing the wheel... You learn a lot by reinventing a wheel. Sometimes what you learn is that a lot of the existing wheels are actually monster truck tires, tank treads, or jet skis. |