• John (unregistered)

    frist

  • thegoryone (unregistered)

    And to think people give PHP developers a bad rap.

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    I saw a site written in shell scripts with redirected stdin and stdout to httpd

  • Quite (unregistered)

    That's a good example of the reason (or one of them) why I distrust the "Anyone can be a programmer!" direction that some people are trying to push technology towards: make the language simple enough, and pretty enough, and graphical enough, and even non-programmers (and non-analytical thinkers) can write business programs to perform business tasks. A bit like giving people giant LEGO(TM) blocks and certifying the purchasers as authorised builders of residential buildings.

    It's an old and shabby rant nowadays, but, sigh, it's a rant that may be oft repeated.

  • Bert (unregistered) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    That's basically how CGI works!

  • Gordon P. Goldsmith, PhD (unregistered)

    Visual Basic - check "tech-savvy" boss - check ASP.NET - check

    yep, that is indeed a failure.

  • isthisunique (unregistered)

    Duh.

    It was to try to stop bots.

  • Phlip (unregistered)

    The worst I've ever seen is something like: Link text

    Because it used to be a link, and it was changed for reasons that escape me, and they only changed the start tag...

  • Phlip (unregistered)

    Um... let me try that again, this time with less garbling?

    The worst I've ever seen in code I've maintained is something like: <span onclick="document.location='somewhere'">Link text</a>

    Because it used to be a link, and it was changed for reasons that escape me, and they only changed the start tag...

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    This is common on small embedded platforms that have a simple http-based configuration screen. Either with an ethernet port or USB-based RNDIS.

  • Martin (unregistered) in reply to Phlip

    LOL!!! I saw that long ago, I asked the guy that made that and he told me: "I made it because was the only way I can align the link to the page in CSS" (the link was inside a floated div class and was trying to look better in IE6), ohh that good 'ol days when every webpage has to be compatible with IE6.

  • squirrel (unregistered)

    @quite, if you mean "programming" as "knowing words in a coding language," then you're correct, but i prefer to think of basic programming as having the logic and reasoning skills that a lot of people calling themselves "programmers" clearly lack (like the generator of this sample). As far as those skills go, background should not be a barrier. Actually bothering to learn, on the other hand.... Huge barrier. :-/

  • Lazerbaems (unregistered)

    A better solution would be to pass the text in the link tag to a neural network, which would then attempt to decipher where the link should go, and instead of injecting javascript with the command to open the new url, inject javascript that makes a call to a REST endpoint to retrieve the result of the NN decision. Of course, to validate the model, a popup window should appear when landing on the new page, asking the user "is this the page you were looking for?" If the user responds that it's the wrong page, redirect to the 404 handler.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Martin
    LOL!!! I saw that long ago, I asked the guy that made that and he told me: "I made it because was the only way I can align the link to the page in CSS" (the link was inside a floated div class and was trying to look better in IE6), ohh that good 'ol days when every webpage has to be compatible with IE6.

    Sadly, ALL web pages feel the need to be IE-compatible, and it gets us in a place where three different applications within our ERP portal need two different IE versions and Firefox to render correctly. This is an excellent example of what @Quite was ranting about.

  • (nodebb) in reply to bvs23bkv33
    I saw a site written in shell scripts with redirected stdin and stdout to httpd

    If you think about it, ALL httpd processes are just spewing text. No reason you can't have a shell script (though there are many reasons you shouldn't). This was a very effective way -- back in the 1830s -- to dump stuff in a browser. Back then, we had shell scripts, httpd, and that's about it. There was no Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, JavaScript. But hey, no worries..... There was no IE, either!

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to Quite

    I don't think ASP.NET web forms code would fall into the categories of either "simple" or "pretty". Have you ever had to code a complex ASP.NET web form while using Microsoft's ajax enabled update controls? I tend to prefer the term "organized chaos".

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to isthisunique

    We have a winner. Perhaps the editor should have actually checked out the context of the stackoverflow answer which was alluded to.

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to Bananafish

    Actually Perl is older than the WWW (though not older than the internet).

  • Michael Storey (unregistered)

    This is not as worrying as it seems.

    The fact that this uses a server side control to display a link gives plenty of advantages. For example ASP.NET has extremely smart support for accessibility and regionalization that relies upon sever side controls. I've done plenty of crap like this in my time, especially in the whacky world of sharepoint development (I know, someone has to do it)

    That been said, I doubt this was the intention.

  • Michael Storey (unregistered)

    This is not as worrying as it seems.

    The fact that this uses a server side control to display a link gives plenty of advantages. For example ASP.NET has extremely smart support for accessibility and regionalization that relies upon sever side controls. I've done plenty of crap like this in my time, especially in the whacky world of sharepoint development (I know, someone has to do it)

    That been said, I doubt this was the intention.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo
    Actually Perl is older than the WWW (though not older than the internet).

    The WWW is older than Perl being used as a CGI scripting language.

  • SomeGuy (unregistered) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    Oooh was it perl? That's what all cgi-bin things did in the past...

  • Richard (unregistered) in reply to Michael Storey

    If you're going to use a server-side control to display a hyperlink, then why not use an appropriate control? Say, the asp:HyperLink control, perhaps.

    All the benefits of a server-side control, with none of the bizarre cludge to try to make it work sort-of like a hyperlink.

  • jay (unregistered)

    I've gotten into a lot of arguments with people who say, "Don't reinvent the wheel. Before you write a line of code, check if something to do what you need is available on the Internet first." While there are times when that's a smart thing to do, it's also the philosophy that results in this sort of junk. Instead of taking ten minutes to write one line of code to do what you really need, you spend several hours searching the Internet for code that sort of kind of does what you need, and then another few hours downloading it and figuring out how to install and configure it, then another few hours figuring out how to use it, and another few hours trying to hammer it into doing what you want.

    If I need a database engine, yes, I'm not going to write my own. I'll buy one. (Or find a free one.) (Unless I have VERY special requirements and the budget to do the job.)

    But if I need a function that I know I could write and debug in an hour or two, I just write it myself. It's less time than searching the Internet for somebody else's solution, and I can make it do exactly what I want.

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