Christopher Bennage

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Bellware: Classic ASP Syntax is Bad?

I want to link to Scott Bellware's post on attitudes regarding classic ASP. He makes an excellent point, and I agree with him.

About four years ago, I remember telling my former employer about the epic superiority of ASP.NET over classic ASP. I could not deride classic ASP enough. Boy, was I a jerk!

Now, I don't want to return to classic ASP, but I have learned to appreciate it again. Just as Scott points out, you can have good code in classic ASP and bad code in ASP.NET (quite easily).

Not too long ago I had to create a classic ASP page for some reason or the other, and I recall thinking being surprised at how simple it was (translate that as "easy"). This reminds a bit of the rediscovery of JavaScript last year.

So, what's the point of saying this? I'm not going to starting working with classic ASP again, but the lesson for me is to be more thoughtful in forming my opinions about a technologies. We developers are quite punctilious and we consider our views are as sacrosanct. (I was vividly reminded of this at our Tallahassee Code Camp, as well as being dealt a crushing lesson in humility, but more on that later...)

Published Sep 23 2007, 03:08 PM by Christopher Bennage

Filed under: ASP.NET, javascript, Musings

Comments

Jeremy said:

Funny, I just read another blog this morning about the same idea, but it was about Rails and PHP. http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html -J

# September 23, 2007 8:32 PM

Dan said:

Anyway, if you create .aspx pages without server controls you get the best of both worlds.

# September 24, 2007 2:51 AM

Scott Bateman said:

In this day of rapidly changing technofads, I think it is important to avoid being religious about your platform and language choices. If you can't back it up with some statistics based on testing (for the specific need), you need to ask yourself what are the true reasons behind your beliefs? I worked with classic ASP for years, and I always found it zippy and reliable. Of course, most of the sites I worked on were small, so for the need they worked just fine. Tool selection must be driven by the need of the project, not the need of the developer to use the coolest stuff.

# September 24, 2007 7:49 AM

Derik Whittaker said:

@Chris, I am actually wanting to post something about working with ASP classic my self. I have had to do some maintenance work on an ASP site. I agree it is simple. But the IDE (or lack there of) sucks, the lack of intelisense sucks and writing code in VBScript (they did not use JScript on the site) really, really sucked.

# September 24, 2007 8:05 AM

Larry Blake said:

You can use the free Visual Studio 2005 Web Developer IDE on classic ASP. That gives you color coding and partial Intellisense. (For example, it shows you available methods / properties for the Response and Request objects, but not your own objects.) It will also tell you about unmatched tags. *Much* better than Notepad.

# September 25, 2007 4:59 PM

Pages tagged "punctilious" said:

Pingback from Pages tagged "punctilious"

# January 22, 2008 4:58 PM

About Christopher Bennage

Christopher is a software developer and consultant at Blue Spire Consulting, a company he co-founded with Rob Eisenberg in 2006. He is a Christian, a marginal musician, and an armchair philosopher. His interests include programming, liberal education, science, truth, beauty, and a number of deceased British authors (C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and most recently Owen Barfield.) He lives in Tallahassee, FL with his wife and three children and still prefers to play as the Night Elves in WarCraft 3.