Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously they have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, and S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions. In this article they chat to Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP and web application framework ASP.NET, used to build dynamic Web sites, applications and Web services.
Neither ASP or ASP.NET are programming languages…they are runtimes for existing languages: ASP is a runtime for VBScript/JScript, and ASP.NET is a set of runtime libraries for any CLR compliant language. This is if you want to get nitpicky.
That being said, their impact on the web has been substantial and I don’t think anyone will deny their importance.
There is one good thing about ASP.
Every command does exactly as it says on the tin. There are not a million exception cases with every command as there is in PHP.
If you know ASP, here’s the best piece of code I ever wrote: http://kroc.deviantart.com/art/clsTemplate-asp-60759882 People might find this funny, until they read the full description. And then it’ll still probably be funny
God, I am getting so sick of PHP. There are so many strange edge cases and so many times the PHP devs refuse to fix the bug, or just get rid of additional related functionality, further worsening the problem.
Performance with PHP is a joke. It still doesn’t have real references, and you have to guess where it does implicit referencing (copy-on-write semantics, e.g., with arrays). Object-orientation with PHP, even PHP5, is still a joke: no proper static inheritance, can’t change the access level of a method through inheritance, etc. I can go on. The more I program in it, the less I like it. I’d rather be doing perl, where things actually work and make sense.
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God, I am getting so sick of PHP. There are so many strange edge cases and so many times the PHP devs refuse to fix the bug, or just get rid of additional related functionality, further worsening the problem.
Performance with PHP is a joke. It still doesn’t have real references, and you have to guess where it does implicit referencing (copy-on-write semantics, e.g., with arrays). Object-orientation with PHP, even PHP5, is still a joke: no proper static inheritance, can’t change the access level of a method through inheritance, etc. I can go on. The more I program in it, the less I like it. I’d rather be doing perl, where things actually work and make sense.
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Try Ruby.
Try Ruby?
So he can experience a language that has even worse performance than PHP, Perl or Python?
With a worse syntax and documentation to boot?
Yeah then he should surely try out Ruby A.S.A.P.
My language for this kind of thing is Python, but I still think that’s a little much. Recommending Ruby to a guy who likes Perl and wants good object orientation seems reasonable to me.
Compared to Python, Ruby gets a couple of things right: regular expressions, no whitespace dependency…
There are some problems with Ruby you might want to know about (http://python2.near-by.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=artic…).
Too soon!
We still have some way to go untill we reach the letter R in the A-Z programming languages…
And that’s basically the truth of it.
I’ve spent my time in the Ivory Tower. I hate bad code as much as the next guy (my own and others), but the fundamental truth is stuff needs to be done.
I am no fan of ASP, for all the reasons a lot of folks aren’t fans of ASP. But its the Hammer that MS provided for folks to easily get dynamic content off of Windows Servers. It integrates well with the Windows environment, and it gets the job done.
Kudos to all you ASP hackers out there getting it done.
Edited 2008-06-13 01:22 UTC
The ASP.NET article was a bit on the marketroid side (no one was named as the interviewee either… Microsoft is not a person).
I really liked the interview with Aho though. I’ve skimmed into the compiler books and they’re obviously some of the best.
It’s a bit funny that this series sort of juxtaposed two languages that are all about ‘getting it done.’
Not particularly interested in ASP, but love this ‘A-Z of programming languages’ series. Mostly because of the human factor behind them, early history, what problem they were meant to solve (originally), and what place they take in today’s software landscape. The sort of things you won’t easily find if you go to a project’s www site.