TempestTempestWritten by Brent on January 16, 2025 — Back
Within the PhpStorm team, we're preparing a blog post that digests the results of our 2024 dev ecosystem survey, and I was asked to pitch in and comment on Laravel's success. I had more thoughts than what fit into that blog post, so I decided to write them down here.
Let's set the scene: data across platforms (dev surveys, packagist, GitHub, …) shows that Laravel is by far the most popular framework in the PHP world today. It's interesting to see how, over the course of a decade, it went from being the underdog the most reputable PHP framework, even well known and looked at outside the PHP world.
This is the point where non-Laravel-PHP-developers might say they don't like Laravel — and they have all right to do so, I have a couple of grievances with Laravel as well. But data doesn't lie: around twice as many people are making a living with Laravel compared to Symfony. Note that that doesn't say anything about Symfony; it's a great framework! It does mean that Laravel is far more poplar.
Why?
There are a lot of factors in play when it comes to software's success, and it's naive to think that this blogpost will encapsulate all the details and intricacies. However, in my experience, there's one thing that stands out, one thing that has been the driving force behind Laravel's success. And how great is it that Steve Jobs already talked about it in 1997:
You gotta start with the customer's experience, and work backwards towards the technology — Steve Jobs, 1997
Start with the customer's experience. "Customers" being "developers" in the case of a framework. Laravel didn't care about best practices. It didn't care about what's "theoretically best". It didn't care about patterns and principles defined by a group of programmers two decades earlier.
It cared about what people had to write when they used Laravel. It put developer experience — DX — first.
I have to admit that there are many things about Laravel that I don't like. Things that I think are wrong. Things that shouldn't be done that way — IMHO™. But at the end of the day? People get the job done with Laravel, and often with a lot less friction than other frameworks. Laravel is easier, faster, and — dare I say — more eloquent than other frameworks. The majority of developers and projects don't need perfection, don't need everything to be a 100% correct. They need frameworks that support them, and get out of their way.
Now, I could conclude this post by explaining how Tempest has that same mindset (which I'm cleverly doing by saying I won't do it 😉), but I won't do that. In all seriousness: I really wanted this post to be about giving kudos to Laravel. Since it's about framework development, I decided to write it on this blog instead of my personal one. I hope that works for everyone!
If anything, please watch that full talk by Steve Jobs, it's really inspiring!