[yagodragon]

For me, it was the learning material and the community. I'm a CS student and i wanted to learn a tool to simply create web apps and bring some ideas to life. I quickly realized that JavaScript is the future of web development so i jumped into it. I don't believe i'm dumb but learning node.js and express almost made me hate web dev. My degree hadn't prepared me for things like ORMs, authentication etc and every tutorial i stumbled upon didn't help me made sense of how all these things work together. At that time, i thought PHP was a joke until i saw laravel and how popular it got. Then i purchased a laracasts subscription and i was shocked how good it was. It just made me a better developer. I don't know if learning PHP in 2020 was eventually a good decision but i'm learning about things like SOLID and TDD while in Node.js i would be stuck trying to install body-parser just to make the simplest thing in web dev, accept an http request.