Well, I'm sure there were a number of key factors involved.
I'm currently porting a rails app to Laravel and the speed boost has been pretty remarkable, not to mention not ever having to install gems whose only purpose is to reboot unicorn when the memory leaks hit a certain threshold.
I didn't choose Laravel because I like PHP (I don't), I chose it because of the need to balance ease of development with speed with having less skilled developers be able to maintain it with a modicum of safety. Not to mention how ridiculously easy it is to horizontally scale PHP.
I'd like PHP more if they dropped the f*cking $ sign though.
The dollar sign usually only bothers me after I've gone away and written a little Python. Actually, has anyone ever tried a 'CoffeeScript for PHP' that removed the dollar sign, replaced the `->` with dot syntax, and smoothed over the various other syntax features that people complain about? Not that I'd think there'd be much point really, apart from being a fun project.
My only hesitation with it has been that you need Node.js to compile it to regular PHP -- it offers no analogue to coffeescript's eval-in-browser mode for development.
I'm currently porting a rails app to Laravel and the speed boost has been pretty remarkable, not to mention not ever having to install gems whose only purpose is to reboot unicorn when the memory leaks hit a certain threshold.
I didn't choose Laravel because I like PHP (I don't), I chose it because of the need to balance ease of development with speed with having less skilled developers be able to maintain it with a modicum of safety. Not to mention how ridiculously easy it is to horizontally scale PHP.
I'd like PHP more if they dropped the f*cking $ sign though.
It's a good tool if you need to get shit done.