The Devil's Kitchen: Ding dong, the Witch is dead...

Whilst praising the fact that Microsoft has finally buried Mac IE DK mentions that

Now, that firm, you see, got diddled by whoever built their site (it was in ASP-X, whatever the hell that is). That's one sale definitely lost to them, before I've even considered (and turned down) their deal.

I am very suprised that the log in didn't work, since it is a bloody simple bit of code however you do it. What ASP-X is I suspect .aspx the file extension used by ASP.NET Microsoft's web technology of the .NET framework. I use it at work (not through choice, I would prefer Python). Personally I think it sucks. It sucks less than PHP, but it still sucks. Here are some of the problems

The framework is enormous and the documentation system is crap. The easiest way to find anything is search MSDN with Google.

The C# language (crap name) isn't exactly lightweight either. When creating Java sun took C++ and removed a whole bunch of things. When creating C# Microsoft took Java and put everything back in. It has a Goto statement for gods sake. Why? K&R considered Goto bad when they where creating C in the 1970's but left it in for exception handling. Java added good exception handling, which C# inherited. So why put Goto back into the language?

C# is almost Java, but not quite. If you know Java then you can write code that will work in that language and expect it to work as C#. Well most of the time. Their naming conventions are subtly different, so writing toString(), the Java way, when I wanted ToString() for .NET got me a couple times when I was starting. Which brings me on to my next point.

Case sensitivity, who on earth thought that was a good idea? Lisp new better back in the 50's.

Strong Typing. Why? The only errors this ever picks up are errors that would not be errors in a dynamically typed system. Strong Typing and Object Orientation is never a good mix, you get a verbose system with far to much code to work around the type system. Where would could deliver the same functionality in far less code where it dynamically typed.

It's not like this hasn't been known for ages either. Smalltalk one of the first OO languages was dynamically typed, as is Lisp, as is Objective C which Sir Tim Berners-Lee praised as letting him make the first web browser much faster.