4
dmonkey
5y

This is yet another rant about php.

But I'll put my hands on first: I'm less than a junior and I'm looking for a backend language to learn.
So far I've been looking at php with Symfony because it's been used where I work.

Is it my impression or Symfony somehow overcomplicates everything? Like I don't know, for any stupid thing I get stucked (like yesterday, spent two hours on a circular reference problem with serialization).

Also, I don't like it's documentation. I am a book person, meaning that I need pages of text explaining how the framework (or whatever) works in a precise order.

Symfony's docs are like a graph: you often have no idea where you are or "what comes next".

Also, I feel like every page makes you just copy-paste everything without explaining very much what's happening under the hood.

I know there is a cookbook, but it's pretty outdated (like it's at version 3 or 2.7, I don't remember).

Is it just me? Do other Symfony developers experienced the same?

Comments
  • 2
    I do agree that some things are vague, I once spent 4 hours to figure out a circular serialization issue just like you. After that it made sense why my server crashed with a simple var_dump($person);

    I learned Symfony by working on an existing project, but whenever I start my own project I usually copy paste most of the config since I find it hard to fine otherwise

    Also, validators and constraints had me in a documentation loop

    I still love the dependency injection capabilities etc.
  • 1
    Never tried Symfony, but PHP itself can be quite the mess. During my last days of PHP I used Laravel a lot. It simplifies things, though as with any framework there is a level of abstraction that you have to get by with.
  • 1
    @alexbrooklyn Nothing to say about DI. It works, and it works great. Same for general performance. But still, I'm thinking to ignore Sf and do something else 😂
  • 2
    @ScriptCoded agreed, luckily Symfony provides filter, filesystem and finder classes that abstract the horrible php functions away
  • 1
    @alexbrooklyn Seems nice, but I'm afraid I've left PHP behind me for the most part. Though if ever have to start i new PHP project I'll look into it for sure.
  • 0
    I’m amazed you are a ‘book person’. I find making projects when learning from scratch really helps me!
  • 0
    @dmoa Me too, but when I face a problem I prefer having some paper that explains things in detail. Sone documentations are detailed enough, other just are not.
  • 0
    @SHA-16384 that's right, but some explanation of complexity would be a good thing
  • 0
    @EDWCode I will try harder... Thanks for the advice man
  • 0
    Maybe you could look into Laravel?
    It relies on Symfony quite a bit without being so hard to learn.
Add Comment