See #1597

Interesting that everybody agreed on "eh... there must be a reason" although none was ever mentioned :D

Well, I do think this has to be done by the user who installs laravel.

But why?

well, if you estimate that your laravel install out of the box should offer this hashbang + chmod feature you'll reference command tool with ./artisan but referencing like this is not compatible with non-unix enviroments. But php artisan command is OS-agnostic and I think its better to stay that way so we can reference its commands the same.

You'd be referencing it by php artisan or ./artisan, both are valid; so it would still be OS-agnostic but also offer "progressive enhancement" for bash-shells

Secondly, and more importantly, it would add to the readability of the code: A non-executable file with no file ending is not helpful at all. You would have to read the docs in order to find out how to use that thing. An executable file on the other hand makes it immediately obvious that this file should be run from the commandline.