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I'll always have a soft spot for Classic ASP[0]. Makes me dream of a simpler time developing CRUD apps.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages

I really wish I’d had a chance to use ASP in an environment doing it properly, rather than the cowboy atmosphere of a tiny web agency. If I understand correctly the idea was that you’d use a proper language for your core business logic which then gets compiled into DLLs loaded by your ASP application, which could then use VBScript for the simple template logic.

Sadly I was at an agency which (I suspect like many other places) just threw stuff like establishing database connections straight into the templates, and had ludicrously complex stuff being done in VBScript, a language designed for light automation.

That was the theory, but in practice people spent a lot of time debugging the transaction server and cleaning out the registry, trying to figure out why their components weren't working. I think we had something like 50K lines of VBS and it was alright because the code was decently structured.

Just use long variable names please. Had to debug an ASP site written in 2019 that used classic three letter variable names for everything and it was rough.

I have some old VBS ASP code around and it uses hungarian notation(!)

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