I'm the founder of a company producing a web based EHR on classic ASP with jscript (not vbscript) since 2001. I've looked at and tried almost every platform that was or is since then (java, PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby/Rails, node, python, scala, go) and have yet to find a superior development platform.

Instead of using vbscript, we chose to use jscript. As the universal language of web development, javascript is now the only language my programmers need to know for both client and server, and every web programmer knows javascript. So, I don't have any problem finding developers. I also don't have much trouble training someone to develop, since javascript is relatively easy.

ASP isn't fast, but, it doesn't matter. All of our HTML is built by transforming XML with XSL. This process DOES use compiled code, so, it's about 10x faster than ASP for building HTML. So, we have very little javascript code inside our pages actually running to build HTML. So, our app is fast.

node is of course a js server; but, the event loop is prone to break and callback oriented coding is a confusing mess esp. for inexperienced developers. MUCH easier to just run ASP on IIS, and have a separate thread for each process; no concerns when a single process crashes. Additionally code can then be written for sequential execution without callbacks. Yeah!

IIS also provides a level of security filtering bad requests, etc. No one wants to have to code this in to their node or python server. IIS also provides SSL support, load balancing, and a host of other features (note, it would be REALLY great if you made ASP run on Apache!)... We can focus on coding and let MS focus on keeping IIS up to date.

Windows development environment allows us to run the debugger on client AND server. Step through execution of jscript makes development enormously faster.

Compilation is eliminated. Obviously, there are speed tradeoffs, but, development is much faster and easier. Additionally, I'm relatively sure that ASP is JIT compiled, and that this is cached, so, there are some optimizations and it runs faster than it would under straight interpretation. Additionally, if classic is brought back, could always add compilation.

jscript is loosely typed which obviously increases the chance of errors. However, most web applications are database driven, and, the database anyway enforces the types. Additionally, loose typing is again easier for devs and in the real web app world, rarely causes any problems. i.e. if someone is consistently putting in strings instead of numbers, it soon causes problems with the app, and, someone soon adds validation to that field.

C#, java, etc, are a pain **********. They are needlessly complex and compilation is always a headache; compatibility issues are never ending. They are fine for heavy duty coding (although, then, C++), but, heavy duty coding is less needed in the web world.

The shortcoming of classic ASP with jscript is lack of access to the windows API (although this DOES increase security). When necessary, we use com/dll/active x components, and this works fine, and there are a lot of them out there. However, it would be great if the reincarnation of classic ASP had support for the native API, particularly for access to office components, pdf manipulation, file manipulation, zipping, etc. Also classic asp with jscript is really bad at dealing with binary data.

In short, classic ASP was a great, simple platform, and it would be great (and easy) to bring it back (not that it ever even really went).

FBOFW, it would also help MS to compete in the web dev world.

The performance tools in Firefox and Chrome both have flame graphs and improving performance there is really easy. Our site is an order of magnitude slower in Edge but we have no idea why because the performance panel just says the time is being taken up by JavaScript without telling us anything else.

I assume this is already on your roadmap because I have no idea how developers at Microsoft are able to improve the performance of their web apps in Edge otherwise. Consider this a strong vote for this feature. When this is implemented, +1000 points for using an open JSON format like Firefox and Chrome do instead of an opaque internal format (we have automated internal tools that consume profiler data from Firefox and Chrome).

Because there was a bug in Edge, I was not able to save more than 50-100kb of data in the localStorage (on every webpage/domain!).
It was impossible for me to find out why and finished to reset completely the Edge app. So I lost all my cookies, passwords and so on.

Never found out why Edge had this problem and I am sure other people are leaving Edge for similar problems. Maybe it would be nice to see why my localStorage was limited to 50kb. Maybe a domain used 100MB and then no other was able to save data anymore…

Other browsers give the possibility to see the quota for each domain. Maybe this would be a nice feature to not "hard-reset" a browser.