Creating a user customizeable webportal in ACT3 as my first real programming job. An undocumented template engine that grew into a full fledged programming lang

Creating a user customizeable webportal in ACT3 as my first real programming job. An undocumented template engine that grew into a full fledged programming language that compiled down to into a perl-dialect which inturn compiled down into native C. (ACT3 was used by just 2 companies APA and DPA) Nearly every (but not all) instruction began and ended like HTML comments. It mixed HTML with code logic and code logic with HTML. Oh, I mean DHTML. Target plattforms: IE 5.5. & IE 6. and Netscape No stack traces, no debugging tools other than alert(). In the end I had a whole meetingroom as my office as ever wall was full of print out sheets and hand written dependency & inheritance graphs. It was a procedural language, nearly functional but every function had mandatory side-effects (as it started as a template engine) with object oriented approaches sprinkeled in. The project was a major success, but as the aspect of maintanance came up we switched to something sane: PHP 3 at that time. These 9 months, it changed me & my brain.