Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so at first, I had no intentions of splitting off and writing a framework. But you're right, one of the first projects I wrote was CI injector, CInject or something like that. I was actually pretty proud of that. It was actually the first reflection-based IOC container in PHP at all that I'm aware of. There was one other IOC container that was also written in 2010, a few months later. That was one of the main pieces of .NET/.MVC that I really like was the auto-resolving container. Laravel's container still works, basically, like that first CodeIgniter container did. The other thing I was really interested in was the better ORM for CodeIgniter, and I wanted to get those two things in ... oh, there was a third thing.
I wanted better templating, like Blade, where you have an @extends at the top, and then you define these sections that override the parent template section, stuff like that. Template inheritance. I remember the final straw, that I couldn't really continue with CodeIgniter anymore, is I wanted auto-resolving dependency injection in my CodeIgniter controllers. To make that work, you really had to start editing the core files in a way that was not in a nice, packageable, shippable way, where other people could do it. Then I hit this crossroads, where I considered just forking CodeIgniter, and making this "special edition" of just sort of souped-up CodeIgniter on steroids, and giving it another name. Or just starting fresh. I think I just started fresh to just experiment at first, and then got so far along, I just kept going. I know I rewrote the first version of Laravel, probably a solid five or six times until I was happy with it.