PHP in 2019
I've actually been really impressed with Laravel after switching back to PHP for a few projects. Not only is the developer tooling experience some of the best I've experienced, it's just really the only framework I've ever experienced with a high quality ecosystem of tools—from Forge[1], which makes it dead-simple to deploy a Laravel app into production to things like Horizon, for managing Redis queues.<p>A great example of this in action is Laravel Spark[3], a first party base for building paid SaaS apps. I built and launched a writing tool, Write Together[2], to the world in under three weeks, payment systems and all, and got 150 paying customers in a matter of a few weeks. One hell of a great way to MVP an idea and build something useful, in a low amount of time.<p>I'm basically developing two Laravel apps full-time at the moment, and it's the most fun I've had in years...compared to the hellscape of NPM dependencies and other complexities I'm usually bogged down with. Composer, the package distribution system, really needs work and is incredibly slow, but other than that—I'm really happy.<p>[1] <a href="https://forge.laravel.com" rel="nofollow">https://forge.laravel.com</a><p>[2] <a href="http://writetogether.space" rel="nofollow">http://writetogether.space</a><p>[3] <a href="https://spark.laravel.com" rel="nofollow">https://spark.laravel.com</a>