PHP DEVELOPMENT

I recently was at a job interview for software developer position (backend) and the company wants someone with
experience with C#/VB.NET/ASP.NET/MVC and LARAVEL/PHP. I had previously done some laravel development but I soon
left php development altogether and started C# and I have not looked back since. But I was adviced by the interviewer
that I should look at PHP/LARAVEL development again as he was impressed with what I was offering their team in terms of
experience and skill. So I got online and got wamp & composer on my system and them got laravel on my system. It wasn't
as bad as I thought it would be. A lot has changed in laravel since I last used it (this was back when it was laravel 3
or so). But I realized that that their idea of a model was totally different from the code-first EntityFramework that I
have come to love and have been using for the last 3 years. So I decided I wasn't going to use the Active Record pattern
that comes with Laravel. I stumbled on some blogs that spoke about the alternative, data mapper pattern with Doctrine 2.
I have been looking at it for the last 24 hours and I have got to say doctrine will make development with Laravel sooo
much more fun than I have experienced so far. See I started development when you had to learn SQL and I have always felt
that learning and using SQL was a distraction to me growing roots deep in Object Oriented Programming. So when I first
heard of ORMs (Object Relational Mapper)s, I wasn't sure how to take it. But when I decided to go .NET, I already was
dreading ADO.NET working with datasets etc, I discovered EntityFramework 5 and decided to find out what this ORM thing was
and I was hooked. I think what the .NET platform and all the languages therein have done for software development is just
remarkable. For me personally, when I decided to take the plunge, what I have learned in 4 years I didn't and could learn
in 5 years with php. But with Doctrine, it seems using php might be fun again for me. My default web dev stack will always
be ASP.NET/MVC since it now is cross-platform, but for those clients who don't want to make a big payment for a webapp,
I think php will be a good alternative.
So in a few words I would like to say to the guys developing Doctrine, THANK YOU!!! You have made me a happy dev. :-)