I completely agree with you ovid. I feel that one of the main reasons why you find more code like this with MS products is their GUI's.

Case 1:
Visual Basic
Many people who work with the Visual Basic IDE have absolutly no idea what it is doing for them. Many know nothing at all about programming languages, and many don't think that anyone would have a different setup then they have. So when an IDE does things without their knowledge, they don't care at all.

I used to work at a campus computer lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and people would ask questions about why some piece of Visual Basic code wasn't working on the computers in the labs, when it worked on their personal PC. Having absolutely no knowledge of VB, I wan't much help.

NOTE: I am aware that ovid was talking about VBScript, which is not Visual Basic, but the point is the same.Also, this only refers to the Visual Studio VB RAD IDE thingy, as that is the only thing I've seen used.

Case 2:
Front Page and IE
My second issue is that large amounts of people use FrontPage, and FrontPage Express(what ever the version that ships with IE) to create web pages. The HTML generated via these programs is awful. Most of the time it will only render properly on IE, and sometimes it won't even render correctly on IE. It is very difficult to read, redundant, and does not conform to any HTML standard.

An even worse crime then using FrontPage to develop HTML is using the Microsoft Office programs to develop it for you. Before looking at HTML generated by word, I'd never seen four identical font tags surrounding one word before.

I also agree that with perl you can write poor and non-robust code with perl, but I think that by having(in most cases) to type the code yourself, and if you Use strict warnings and diagnostics or die like a good programmer, then your code turns out much better.

-xPhase

UPDATE: Fixed a spelling mistake, thanks to tadman

In reply to Re: Microsoft vs. Perl and sloppy programming - Wildly OT by xphase_work
in thread Microsoft vs. Perl and sloppy programming - Wildly OT by Ovid

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