Reminds me of how in some old Unix system, /bin/true
was a shell script.
…well, if it needs to just be a program that returns 0, that’s a reasonable thing to do. An empty shell script returns 0.
Of course, since this was an old proprietary Unix system, the shell script had a giant header comment that said this is proprietary information and if you disclose this the lawyers will come at ya like a ton of bricks. …never mind that this was a program that literally does nothing.
I recommend checking out Python (Django) and Ruby (Ruby on Rails) if you want nice and easy modern Web frameworks that also aren’t that weird if you have PHP experience.
Versioning your code with Git makes it much easier to experiment with new ideas. Cocked up a file? Pull it from the previous version. Create new branches for experiments, merge them in if they work, toss them if they don’t, or keep them around just in case, without them ever getting in your way in the “real” version.
And if you keep the code in a server (GitHub etc), that gives you a backup location and makes it easier to work on code on multiple systems.