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Here, Laravel creator Taylor Otwell shares the story behind his coding style.
Transcript
I’ve always put a lot of attention to detail into Laravel from the very beginning. I think part of that is going back all the way to when I was a kid. I think, like my dad and my grandpa were also very detail oriented people that always was kind of like, you know, it’s kind of the old story of: If you’re building a dresser, you like, finish the backside of the dresser or the backside of the furniture that no one sees because like, you’ll know about it, then it’s like this imperfection and you want it to be perfect all the way through.
I think I always kind of had that sort of mentality with Laravel as well. I want every little detail to be totally perfect because I don’t feel confident building my own projects on it. If I don’t know if I don’t know that everything is totally thought out, totally meticulously crafted.
If I know there’s like some imperfection I’ve like left and there, it’s just going to bug me, you know, like, I won’t be able to sleep at night, because I’ll be up stressed about it or whatever. So I need it to be pretty much thoroughly thought through the whole way.
So when I was in college, I like, developed this very minimalistic streak and my personality, where and I wasn’t always like that as a teenager, as a kid. But I just like was only focused on having the most essential possessions. You know, I didn’t even have a laptop at my first apartment. I didn’t have internet, and that sort of personality trait is still present in me, and it’s been softened a little bit.
You know, as I’ve had kids, as I’ve had a family, I’ve got like a real life. I can’t be, as you know, just crazy, minimalist as I once was. But you can definitely see that influence on Laravel, where the syntax is very terse.
The syntax is very clean and minimal and memorable. The features are very like just the most essential things that most web applications would need. We try not to have a lot of bloat or on essential things and even down to like the marketing.
The website is all very clean, very polished and minimalistic, you might say. So that personality trait that I have has definitely crept into the framework and the ecosystem, and even like the community projects themselves, sort of like pick up on that vibe, you know, because that vibe has already been set in the framework.
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