I heart Laravel

Recently all the code I've been writing has been in Python which is definitely my preference at the moment. But I got some freelance work which required me to build a site using PHP so I went shopping for a framework and ended up with Laravel.

I really couldn't have been happier. Super modern, super easy and opinionated just the right amount. There was never really a point where I was trying to figure out how to work around the default way of doing something. Laravel is present but never in the way.

I'd say the ORM (Eloquent) is probably the best one I've used. I prefer it to both SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM.

The documentation is also top notch which is so important.

Testing is such a central part of the framework making that feel very easy as well. There's even a cli tool that generates basic tests for you automatically. Database seeds and migrations are also built with tests in mind so it's easy to generate a large amount of random data to test.

Then there's just the little things like all the Façades that are not only convenient but so eloquent that you want to use them just because they look pretty.

Finally, when I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why some work was fine on one server but broken on the other, the kind people at the Laravel IRC channel were so wonderfully helpful and patient.

PHP really has come a long way. Laravel is proof.