Comment by ivanhoe

IMHO Laravel and Symfony are the best things that happened to PHP community since php5. PHP was an ugly mess of bad practices, fragmented into many outdated apps/frameworks and it was just exhausting to use. Symphony was a great improvement, but a bit too rigid and too enterprise-level for my taste. For me Laravel was honestly a breath of fresh air - finally I had something significantly more powerful than my custom framework and still highly flexible and light-weight.