Beware clever devs, says Laravel inventor Taylor Otwell

"Developers are sometimes drawn to building "cathedrals of complexity that aren't so easy to change," he said, speaking in a podcast for maintainable.fm, a series produced by Ruby on Rails consultancy Planet Argon. Software, he said, should be "simple and disposable and easy to change." Some problems are genuinely complex, but in general, if a developer finds a "clever solution" which goes beyond the standard documented way in a framework such as Laravel or Ruby on Rails, "that would be like a smell.""

"He built Laravel over seven months in 2010 to create a Ruby on Rails equivalent for PHP. Existing PHP frameworks were too Java-inspired, and Otwell wanted something with a built-in ORM (object-relational mapper) that offered more functionality out of the box. Some aspects of Laravel were drawn from Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC, he said, which has a view engine called Razor. "So I named our view engine Blade. It was directly inspired by ASP.NET.""

"The framework took off and Otwell now reckons that the PHP landscape is, for most new projects, Laravel or Symfony, with Symfony perhaps more popular in Europe than in the US. There is also WordPress, which is "its own universe," he added, and one that "we don't tend to interact with." The latest JetBrains Developer Ecosystem survey found Laravel in use by 61 percent of PHP developers, followed by WordPress at 23 percent, and Symfony at 21 percent."

Developers sometimes build overly complex systems that become hard to change. Software should be simple, disposable, and easy to change. Clever solutions that bypass documented framework patterns often signal a code smell and can cause future maintenance problems. Laravel was created in 2010 over seven months to provide a Rails-like framework for PHP with a built-in ORM because existing PHP frameworks were too Java-inspired. The Blade view engine was inspired by ASP.NET Razor. Laravel and Symfony now dominate new PHP projects, and surveys report Laravel used by a majority of PHP developers.

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