> I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.
PHP got a very long way since then, but a huge part of that was correcting the early mistakes.
> PHP 8 is significantly better because it contains a lot less of my code.
I'm not sure in which spirit you mean that, so I'm going to choose "approvingly" :-)
I do have thoughts for later about modes which could take all the config from .htaccess files and build them into the main config so then you avoid any performance issues - however you have to do that carefully to make sure people don't include any bad config that crashes the whole server. One of the nice things about using .htaccess files as intended is Apache has the Nonfatal flag on AllowOverride so you can avoid that. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#allowoverrid...
I mean honestly - the "classic" Apache model of throwing things into the www root is very strong for rapid development. Hot code reloading is sometimes finicky, you can end up with unexpected hidden state and lose sanity over a stupid heisenbug. Trust me.
IMO you don't need to compensate for bad configs if you're using a proper staging environment and push-button deployments (which is good practice regardless of your development model). In prod, you can offset its main issue (atomic deployments) by swapping a symlink. In that scenario, having a separate .htaccess file actually helps - you don't want to restart Apache if you can avoid it, and again - hot reloading can hide state.
My main issue is that this is all a very different model from what most languages, frameworks, and runtimes have been doing for almost 20 years now. If you're a sysop dealing with heterogenous environments, it's honestly just annoying to have separate tooling and processes.
Personally, ca 10 years ago, this was the tipping point at which I've demanded from our PHP devs that they start using Docker - I've been reluctant about it until that moment. And then, whether it was .htaccess or the main config, no longer mattered - Apache lived in a container. When I needed to make sure things performed well, I used Locust <https://locust.io/>. Just measure, then optimise.
So in practice, yes, spiritually I'm doing what PHP8 did to PHP3. Whether that's "approvingly" is up to your interpretation ;)
> I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.
PHP got a very long way since then, but a huge part of that was correcting the early mistakes.
> PHP 8 is significantly better because it contains a lot less of my code.