The developer experience is bad, even compared to other PHP-based frameworks like laravel. It may not be bad 15 years ago, but when the rest of the word has moved forward. When other frameworks compete with each other to give the best developer experience, wordpress developer experience hasn't improved (or even regressed depending on who you ask). I've been creating and maintaining several plugins and themes in the past 10 years, and these days whenever I work on them I feel dread. In contrast, I feel joy when working on django projects, dabling with phoenix/elixir, or various react-based framework.
To be honest, I don't know if wordpress can improve their developer experience without killing the golden goose.
Edit; sorry I misread your comment somehow! I will leave my response anyway. But it is not actually relevant to your comment; sorry about that. I agree with you, I guess the ‘even compared’ threw me off; laravel is pretty painless imho so maybe it does actually apply?
What is bad about laravel for development experience? I don’t like php or js or, dare I say it, ts (I don’t mind the language and like the type system but the tooling is so rotten; hope deno will fix things), so I often experiment in projects by taking something else like Phoenix, IHP or Dioxus etc and it’s nice, but you always run into the lack of help when stuck. I did a large project with a team with laravel the past months and was really surprised how productive it is; we did basically the impossible in a very short time. Mostly because plug-ins and the bizarre amount of capable people willing to help all over the place.
Still don’t like the language but it’s very productive and robust imho.
Wordpress I did quite a lot with as well but I will never like it; it is too messy to be clean and too clean to be a mess; it doesn’t fit my way of thinking either way.
I feel real joy not having to use JS for anything though; things like liveview/livewire/blazor/dioxus etc really make my life better.
Yes, I meant when compared to other framework written in the same language, the developer experience is vastly different. Developing with laravel is miles better compared to wordpress despite using the same language.
