orang55

This is as good of a place as any to mention that I built https://howtoquitvim.com a while back if you need a less-sadistic reminder for how to exit Everybody's Favorite Text Editor.

Possibly best represented by this ridiculous infographic: https://martechtoday.com/infographic-marketing-technology-la...

Many of Laravel's components can also be stripped out and used as microframeworks. Their database ORM is particularly nice, and I use it alongside Slim on a few projects.

From my experience using it, Laravel also feels a lot "lighter" than the other big frameworks of the past. It's a bit less opinionated, and it's much easier to get set up and running.

I'd take issue with arguing that there isn't much innovation in the PHP community.

It might not be the best language for every application (I find myself using it less and less these days), but there have been a whole ton of recent developments that have made it much nicer to work with.

PHP 5.4 made some pretty significant improvements, and Laravel is one of the nicest full-stack frameworks I've ever worked with. PHP now has good/sane dependency management via Composer, and many of Laravel and Symfony's components can now be used outside of the main framework. Microframeworks are a pleasure to work with in PHP, which is especially nice for smaller one-off webapps.

Many of the recent improvements have been (very) late to the game, but they're nevertheless welcome. I could do without the Java-esque levels of verbosity that PSR-0 encourages, but it does seem to result in highly-maintainable code.

"New PHP" projects (written from scratch, targeting 5.3 and above) tend to be of surprisingly high quality. As I've mentioned before, Laravel emerged from nowhere as a lightweight and very high-quality framework, long after the PHP community had been declared moribund.

Yes, the cost of installing a Bixi-like system is fairly expensive.

However, when you're talking about transportation systems, Bikesharing is an absolute steal. Repaving a city street costs $338,000 per mile. A city bus costs anywhere from $500-750,000. Subway cars and commuter railcars run in the range of $2 million each.

A 15-dock bikesharing station plus 8 bikes costs as much as a Lexus. http://www.capitalbikeshare.com/assets/pdf/cabi_station_spon...

Washington, DC built its entire bikesharing system for somewhere between $6 and $10 million. That's way less than the cost of a single 8-car Metro train.

If we're talking about a system for a large city, the infrastructure costs are low enough as to be irrelevant. If the system can cover its operating costs (which DC's does, even at a surprisingly-high $1,860/bike/year cost), it's basically a slam-dunk.

The bigger challenge will come from figuring out how to scale the system out into the suburbs.

The problems associated with a decentralized system such as ViaCycle (difficult to attract causal users/tourists, significantly more prone to theft, much more difficult to redistribute, similar maintenance costs, more expensive bikes) don't seem to compensate for the reduced capital costs.