[Lerain]

As a Laravel user, I am extremely happy about the different paths you can take and I think it's absolutely fantastic that you are _able_ to avoid those magical things like a plague, if you don't want or need them.

I find Livewire a pleasure to work with. It's certainly not a hammer for every nail, but a refreshing step away from the JavaScript madness without sacrificing all of the good parts about it (anything async, basically).

[dncornholio]

Like I said, It becomes harder and harder to avoid it and that worries me. I used Laravel because anyone could just hop in and be productive.. I've asked myself why I'm not using just Symfony already, because I think Laravel is something that it's not anymore, or wasn't ever. Laravel is basically Taylor's view on how people should write code.

[aejnsn]

> hop in and be productive

Breeze and Jetstream are more recent optional packages, and Laravel is still productive without them. So effectively you are saying, “I wish Docker Hub had fewer images available, it’s more productive without.” Pfffft

[Lerain]

I get your point and this conversation might be as old as Laravel itself. I would like to point out a couple of things though:

The "hop in and be productive" part is directly related to Laravel being pretty opinionated. It's hard to have the one without the other. I think it's comparable to Steve Jobs, who had pretty strong opinions about certain things, too. The end result is a "product" that doesn't try to be the right fit for everyone.

Livewire, just like Jetstream[1] etc. is opt-in. When Jetstream was introduced, there was quite an uproar (by parts of the community) about Laravel forcing users into Livewire or Inertia[2]. The end result was (imho) a very healthy shift in communication around it (to emphasize the opt-in part), followed by the introduction of Breeze[3], which goes to show that Taylor does recognize the reservations some people may have about those new shiny toys.

It's a very natural thing that big projects like that will have an ever-growing feature set. That is an important part of keeping existing users excited. The Jetstream-discussion has been an important lesson for the team (I hope) and I'm glad it ended the way it did.

You can still build your Laravel app in a pretty similar fashion as you would have done 5 years ago and if you want, you can make use of the recent additions, so I think there's not too much to worry about to be honest. If you have outgrown the magic, isn't it pretty amazing that you can drop down one level of abstraction and just use symfony? Also, do you think you would've grasped many of the underlying features of symfony, if it wasn't for Laravel's opinionated wrapping in a nicer syntax (pardon my oversimplification)?

Nevertheless, I think it's good to keep up the warning signs and have this discussion from time to time. ;-)

[1] https://github.com/laravel/jetstream [2] https://inertiajs.com/ [3] https://github.com/laravel/breeze

[dncornholio]

I have to admit, I'm still a bit biased against Taylor because of the Jetstream fiasco, but it seems it's getting harder to justify those feelings. Thanks for refreshing things.

[Kiro]

How is Jetstream a fiasco?

[begueradj]

Yes. But that is the case of all other tools and frameworks: a product devised by an individual's (or a group of individuals), opinion, taste and experience.