[joshanthony]

I'll throw in my hat for PHP. There will be many people who will tell you to avoid PHP and I would have agreed if it wasn't for the Laravel framework. Laravel 4 is really amazing, it carries the simplicity and power of Ruby on Rails over to the PHP world. As a framework it covers most of your typical newbie problems out of the box (e.g. plugging security holes and organising your code) and you'll end up doing things in one line of code that you previously did in 5. Laravel also basically forces you to write really reusable code by using their Eloquent ORM system.

Though my favourite great thing about Laravel is that the community IS ON FIRE (in a good way). You'll get a response to most questions on Stack Overflow or the Laravel Forum within a few hours or even less sometimes. The core dev team are friendly and really available to help out. I found that when people use Laravel they don't just use it, they love it and become almost strangely obsessed with it. It's also pretty new so you can safely assume that your skills will not go out of date really soon or anything.

Take a look at this article for some more info: https://tutsplus.com/tutorial/why-laravel-is-taking-the-php-...

and this Stack Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13693795/to-swap-or-not-t...

[nickthemagicman]

I would like to second this. Laravel is all the lessons learned from a decade of frameworks, code igniter, kohana, and others.

Its the cutting edge framework. Plus, PHP is the most widely supported scripting language on the planet. Its the default scripting language for any host to support.

Also, combine it with Bootstrap and Jquery, You'll have amazing job opportunities and will be able to make amazing things.

Caveat, learning web dev is a godforsaken nightmare until you know it, then you feel the POWAH.

[jasonlotito]

> Laravel is all the lessons learned from a decade of frameworks, code igniter, kohana, and others.

If Laravel learned anything from those frameworks, it's how to make all the same mistakes using an update version of PHP, and invent new mistakes on top of it.

No, Laravel is not the solution. It's encouragement of globals, it's decision to implement solutions in the slowest ways possible. It's a complete mess.

You cannot use Laravel as an example of best practices.

[nickthemagicman]

Ohrlly? Your comment is literally an paragraph of inflamatory statements with nothing to back them up.

Globals? Have you used it since the new version? It's all namespaced now.

"It's decision to implement solutions in the slowest ways possible. It's a complete mess."

What does that even mean?

I can whip up a really excellent CRUD app in TEN minutes.

What is your 'better' alternative? Are you a Ruby 'rockstar'?

[jasonlotito]

> Ohrlly? Your comment is literally an paragraph of inflamatory statements with nothing to back them up.

Yeah, it's a comment. Not an essay. These are clearly my opinions based on my years of experience. That being said, yours offered nothing other than opinions as well, so it's balanced.

> Globals? Have you used it since the new version? It's all namespaced now.

If it's changed, they haven't updated their docs. I can only go by this:

http://laravel.com/docs/routing

Could you please direct me to the latest docs?

> I can whip up a really excellent CRUD app in TEN minutes.

That's really not an endorsement to the quality of a framework, nor is it a unique feature of Laravel.

> What is your 'better' alternative?

In the PHP space? Zend or Symfony. Both do things better. Beyond that, most other new frameworks suffer from the same problems Laravel has.

> Are you a Ruby 'rockstar'?

No. I'm a programmer, not a programming language.

Laravel does a lot things many would consider bad. Sure, it makes CRUD easy, and it has a low learning curve, which many consider a feature. But being easy doesn't mean doing things well. CodeIgniter is easy, after all.