Ask HN: Why are so many PHP projects moving to Node? 16 by kypro | 8 comments on Hacker News. I started my software engineering career as a PHP developer about 15 years ago. Looking back now I understand why PHP had a bad reputation - the language objectively had a lot of problems and the PHP ecosystem in the mid 00s was very immature compared to the battle tested ecosystems of Java and .NET. But since then, and with the release of PHP 7, the language and ecosystem has matured massively. For one, Laravel is excellent - the framework is well designed, the docs are some of the best I've ever worked with, and the developer tooling is (in my opinion) unrivalled. I work mostly on Node / Java back ends professionally these days, but I find myself almost exclusively using Laravel for my personal projects. THe reason being I'm so much more productive in PHP & Laravel compared to Java. And don't get me wrong, Java is great for building enterprise software, but for small to me...