[zeph]

Sometimes people can become overly fixated on what's hidden from them. You say you prefer PHP, but when was the last time you looked at the source code for any of the myriad extensions? Can you explain how mod_php works within apache?

Whilst I do think that it's good to have a broad view of how things fit together, knowing what every line of code is doing says to me that you are either working on incredibly trivial code, and/or you're not using existing, well-tested libraries as much as you could be.