Today I really could have used a cheat-sheet on regular expressions in ASP 3.0 (a.k.a. "ASP Classic"). For my gentle (non-programmer) reader, all you need to know is that it's a very dated language. Translated: Few want to be so uncool--in front of teh internets an' everybody--as to admit to remembering something soooo 2000 and all.
Yet there's a lot of it loitering about on web servers, simply because it, for so long, ASP was a stable platform. One could upgrade to the next version without fear of having to re-write existing code. Then Microsoft broke that tradition with .NET 1.0. And--as I understand it--broke it again with .NET 2.0.
Understand that the initial cost of rewriting and debugging and testing so much code was, by itself, daunting. Thus, the tendency to hang on to the existing code-base, particularly when there was no guarantee that Microsoft wouldn't pull the same shennigans with the heir to 2.0.
Sadly, while it seems that hardware (e.g. Commodore-64) and applications (i.e. games like Tetris, Pong, Pac-man, Super Mario Bros.) can have a second life via nostalgia, the same doesn't seem to be true of the languages that originally powered them.
That makes me sad. It's not the demise of the language so much as the ignominy that precedes it--and the lack of an honorable memorial. Which, I suppose, exposes the fault line that runs through some--maybe even most?--programmers: Infatuation with the new and shiny on one side vs. respect for craftsmanship on the other.
