# Laravel Inventor Tells Devs To Quit Writing 'Cathedrals of Complexity'
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 19:22:01 2025-09-02
Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework. From a report: Developers are sometimes drawn to building "cathedrals of complexity that aren't so easy to change," he said, speaking in a podcast for maintainable.fm, a series produced by Ruby on Rails consultancy Planet Argon.
Software, he said, should be "simple and disposable and easy to change." Some problems are genuinely complex, but in general, if a developer finds a "clever solution" which goes beyond the standard documented way in a framework such as Laravel or Ruby on Rails, "that would be like a smell."
A code smell -- for the uninitiated in the The Reg readership -- is a term developers use for code that works but may cause problems at a later date. Otwell described himself as a "pretty average programmer" but reckons many others are the same, solving basic problems as quickly and efficiently as they can.
[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/02/1829251/laravel-inventor-tells-devs-to-quit-writing-cathedrals-of-complexity?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 19:22:01 2025-09-02
Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework. From a report: Developers are sometimes drawn to building "cathedrals of complexity that aren't so easy to change," he said, speaking in a podcast for maintainable.fm, a series produced by Ruby on Rails consultancy Planet Argon.
Software, he said, should be "simple and disposable and easy to change." Some problems are genuinely complex, but in general, if a developer finds a "clever solution" which goes beyond the standard documented way in a framework such as Laravel or Ruby on Rails, "that would be like a smell."
A code smell -- for the uninitiated in the The Reg readership -- is a term developers use for code that works but may cause problems at a later date. Otwell described himself as a "pretty average programmer" but reckons many others are the same, solving basic problems as quickly and efficiently as they can.
[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/02/1829251/laravel-inventor-tells-devs-to-quit-writing-cathedrals-of-complexity?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.