Planet php has a strange and probably unique geography. It has its large continent of modern generic web frameworks but it also has these countless small but thriving islands of specialized platforms that solved specific problems.
But islanders and continentals dont talk or help each other.
You can obviously build from scratch a blog, a wiki, lms, forum, analytics, e-commerce, survey etc. etc. site in Laravel. The funny thing is that it is quite likely that the leading open source solution for what you want to do is already in php (wordpress, mediawiki, etc) yet you cannot benefit much from it. You definitely cannot import it, but you cant even learn easily from it unless you dig deep into a complicated codebase.
Because php is so old and so adapted to web development people went on and built wonderful things with it, capturing complex domains with all their peculiarities. But that valuable knowledge base remains fragmented and locked within each one of these monoliths.
Going forward there is ever more intense competition between open source language ecosystems. A lot of improvement efforts look inward (making languages faster, safer).
The php community might also be able to draw unique advantage looking more "externally", taping the enormous ___domain knowledge of all these projects. How that could be done in practice is an open question, but it could become the USP for php, the way data science has become for Python.
But islanders and continentals dont talk or help each other.
You can obviously build from scratch a blog, a wiki, lms, forum, analytics, e-commerce, survey etc. etc. site in Laravel. The funny thing is that it is quite likely that the leading open source solution for what you want to do is already in php (wordpress, mediawiki, etc) yet you cannot benefit much from it. You definitely cannot import it, but you cant even learn easily from it unless you dig deep into a complicated codebase.
Because php is so old and so adapted to web development people went on and built wonderful things with it, capturing complex domains with all their peculiarities. But that valuable knowledge base remains fragmented and locked within each one of these monoliths.
Going forward there is ever more intense competition between open source language ecosystems. A lot of improvement efforts look inward (making languages faster, safer).
The php community might also be able to draw unique advantage looking more "externally", taping the enormous ___domain knowledge of all these projects. How that could be done in practice is an open question, but it could become the USP for php, the way data science has become for Python.