It isn't awful. But, it isn't portable (which is not a problem if you live in an exclusively Microsoft environment).

And it is quite dated -- it hasn't advanced at all in terms of separating layout & design from business logic and code, but I suppose COM/COM+ was supposed to help with that a bit.

Now had you asked, "why is Microsoft so awful?" I might have more to say about their negative impact on the IT world and business in general. ;-)

As to your second question; if you can deliver your application on time and without excessive midnight oil, if it works the way you intended, if it scales to meet user demand without chewing up all of your available resources and if it is easily maintained (especially if somebody other than the author gets to do this) then I'd say you have found a fine solution, regardless of the technology. And extra kudos if you had fun developing it along the way!

Question #3: Perl frequently allows developers to meet the criteria I give for Q#2 (although maintainability can be a bit tricky unless you resist the urge to use "tricky" code and skimp on documentation)... that makes it great in those particular situations. It is also my perception that Perl has associated with it a strong and selfless developer community, at least moreso than you would find with ASP.

Others have already pointed out that you can't compare ASP (not a language, but a server side scripting solution) with Perl (a language AND a party favor!). You could, however, compare PerlScript/ASP with VB/ASP and/or ECMAScript/ASP though, and if your app required a lot of string processing, I think we know how the vote would go.

PCS