ASP, ASP.NET or CGI?

I've worked with BASIC languages for a number of years now, for the fun of it, and for business...But still am only an intermediate at best. I'm considering getting more serious about programming but am not sure in which language to develop. As I mentioned, I have the most skill in BASIC languages, and amongst scripting languages I've worked a bit with ASP and a tiny bit with JavaScript. What do you think is the future of ASP? Is it outdated and dead? Should one move on to ASP.NET? Should ASP(/.NET) be abandoned for a language like Perl?
My interest is mainly in developing a large and robust search engine with a better ranking algorithm. I've been considering learning Java b/c of Nutch, but wasn't sure if there was anything similar out there for a BASIC language which might be easier for me to learn. I've tried learn C++ a bit but then dropped off, so I'd have to start over again, anyways, any thoughts would be appreciated.
Respectfully,
David.

Java will probably not give you the level of performance you need for search engine algorithms. ASP is going into the sunset, but will still be around for a decade or so. The next release of .NET due later this year will contain a lot of features to lower the bar for entry level development. You may want to wait until it's released to make your move.

.NET will give much better performance than ASP, but I think as your search base grows, you'll find that algorithms that do the actual search and ranking will need to be in C/C++ running on a stripped down Unix box - perhaps BSD.

I'd still use .net for the UI though. Also worth noting is that the Common Language Runtime for .net is being ported to unix - C# - IIRC. Haven't followed it enough to know it it's a good thing or something horrible like Chilisoft ASP.

 

You simply cannot use .NET on a linux box ATM... MS is porting it over though. Personally:

ASP = No power, have to use COM objects to do anything useful, outdated soon

ASP.NET = Very powerful, fast and secure

CGI = Outdated, slow, Anti-RAD

A well set up linux/BSD box outperforms a well set up windows box. A poorly set up windows box out performs (IMHO) a poorly set up linux/bsd box. Windows gets a bad rap because of all the clowns running it as a desktop. A well set up W2K/W2K3 server is a pretty solid beast.

At slashdot.org a while ago, they had some survey that showed that there were more breakins on unix servers than on windows servers. You can argue with the methodology of the survey, but a lot of people with experience with both types of servers tend to more or less agree. My personal experience (25+ years unix, almost almost 15 with windows) bears out that observation. Also, if someone cracks one of my windows servers (which hasn't happened in 3/4 years), It takes from a hour to a day to recover. Someone cracks one of my unix servers, and I'm in deep sh*t - the quality of the blackhat hacker is better.

.NET is pretty fast, and real stable. It's a good dev platform. A lot of corporations went with vb.net as a vehichle for moving their vb developers forward. But vb.net is more than vb on steroids. I'ts a full oo development environment with it's own methods, practices, and design models. A lot of former vb people approaced it like "this must be the same as x in vb". for the most part, they were wrong and just wound up repeating their past bad vb on a more expensive platform.

Compared to linear or waterfall development, .net is a mindset change to how you visualize, approach, develop, and test a project. IMHO, C# leads you to an understanding of the .net platform faster than vb does. YMMV.

C/C++ cgi programs are quite fast up to a point. There are often threading issues that prevent them from being scalable beyond a certain point. C++ does better than C for threading Large/Very Large Scale apps. Some of that depends on how your network, web server, OS or kernal is tuned. What's extremely fast for 500 concurrent users, breaks down for 1000. .Net does a good job with scalability from what I've seen. The platform lends itself to dispersing an app across many boxes easier than a cgi based solution.

Don't think you'd be disappointed with .net C#. If you get a handle on the platform before you get into design, the inherent methods of the platform will lead you to encapsulate the algorithmic pieces into something that you could swap for other programs, on other platforms if the need arises.