I've heard this criticism of Laravel a couple times and never understood it. I've been using the framework for years and have never had an issue with upgrades. There is a clear and comprehensive upgrade guide with each release, as well as a third-party package called Laravel Shift that can inspect your code and perform automatic upgrades in many cases. I've found there are only one or two breaking changes per minor version release (which seems reasonable to me), and they are always well-documented.

Aside from that, I'm glad you've highlighted Laravel, which—despite being the most popular server-side Web framework on GitHub—gets virtually no attention from HN. It's typical to use Laravel in the old server-side rendered Rails paradigm (which is still probably best for some applications), but I've had success using it to develop APIs as well. Core features like the ORM, job queues, dependency injection, email templating, etc, are very solid, and the ecosystem of packages around it is phenomenal. I would recommend it to any Web developer.

Laravel also as a lightweight version called Lumen for simpler APIs and things. It includes a lot of the features of core Laravel but has a more stripped-down application structure.

The PHP experience was one of the worst experiences I have ever experienced.

PHP is very fast. The tooling is great, and it's very easy to get started. VSCode with the right extensions makes PHP development fun.

D:

Which are the "right extensions" because what I saw was not "fun" at all.

Have you ever built a web application with java?

Java EE? Yeah, I did not enjoy that at all. The current blend of Spring Boot, Micronaut, Vert.x, or especially Quarkus.io? I love it!

Ok. I agree vert.x and quarkus.io really look promising! I was using the play framework which looked similar at first glance and then was horrible as java was just at the surface and one needed to use scala in the end. Learning scala with a java team under time preasure was not a good experience...

I did Play v2 with Scala... I can agree, it was not pleasant. (I had just gotten off a year-long Ruby on Rails/ JRuby on JVM stint though - so "pleasant" is a relative term)

What year was this?

How come it has a best developer experience? Even setting up xdebug and starting debugging is a pain. Most of the developers codes in php use `echo` for a long time.

PS: I haven't used php for 2 years, let me know if there is an update on debugging.

Yes I totally agree that setting up or rather understanding how the debugging cylcle works with php is not straight forward. It doesn't work out of the box and one has to dig into php internas. However, it pays off, as one can do remote debugging on e.g. a docker development machine or similar...

I am not sure how well such a feature is supported in javascript, ruby, java or what not out of the box...

Have you tried Symfony?

Not in a few years. Does the maintainer value backwards compatibility?

They do. They have a deprecation path, and descriptions on what to change when versions change.