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Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability

(maintainable.fm)
105 points robbyrussell | 6 comments | 26 Aug 25 12:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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kiririn ◴[30 Aug 25 12:19 UTC] No.45073990[source]▶
Still maintaining a Laravel 3 project. Barely made it 2 years before maintainability became a nightmare and the only upgrade path was complete rewrite. Projects written without an opinionated framework easily sail past 10 years of comfy maintainability
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1. dham ◴[30 Aug 25 12:31 UTC] No.45074063[source]▶
We started on Rails 3.2 and on Rails 8 now. Some upgrades were harder than others, but they never warranted anything close a rewrite.
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2. kiririn ◴[30 Aug 25 13:34 UTC] No.45074553[source]▶
Not a Ruby/Rails person, but from a quick look there are still APIs named exactly the same between those versions. Very nice to see

On the other hand, Laravel decided to change from snake_case to CamelCase between versions 3 and 4, just because. Literally 0% compatibility

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3. gkedzierski ◴[30 Aug 25 14:01 UTC] No.45074772[source]▶
They also completely changed the project structure recently, which made 100% of previous tutorials and examples on the internet obsolete.
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4. thibaut_barrere ◴[30 Aug 25 14:40 UTC] No.45075064[source]▶
Rails 2 to 3 was a bit more involved than others, also Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 !

But ultimately it got better IMO, indeed.

5. kyleee ◴[30 Aug 25 15:26 UTC] No.45075439{3}[source]▶
Ouch, I haven’t kept up to date. Have any links explaining? Thanks
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6. gkedzierski ◴[30 Aug 25 16:06 UTC] No.45075749{4}[source]▶
https://laravel-news.com/laravel-11-directory-structure

Things which you were able to configure in the past, are now hidden. The meaning of many files (e.g. bootstrap) is now completely different. All different service provider classes are gone.