Matt's Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped the Web

Any webpage that needed a credit card number we would use a generator which worked about 50% of the time

I was tinkering with making websites for the band I was in (learned html through htmlgoodies.com) but I needed a contact form. I'd never really touched a computer before and I expected formmail to be some wall of incomprehensible binary. I was amazed when I opened it and found plain english.

It was the moment I stopped being a drummer and started being a web developer. That was 1999. I've never stopped writing code since.

Magical.

> The site Wright built, Matt’s Script Archive, unwittingly helped to highlight the divergence between how normal people think about software, and the developer’s perspective.

Because I've been in a lot of communities where buggy, poorly coded tools and resources became incredibly popular (to the dire of more professional/skill programmers), simply because they solved a need that wasn't being addressed elsewhere.

For example, I was in an old school modding community where a certain user had released dozens of resources recreating characters and elements from other games. On a technical level, these were absolutely awful. The code was a Frankenstein's monster style mishmash of code from other resources that was edited just enough to get it to work, the behaviour was often buggy or incredibly basic compared to the material that inspired it, and everything was woefully inefficient, with ten times more code than there needed to be. Every skilled programmer in the community hated this guy and his work, and even today he's seen as a source of mockery.

But said resources were also incredibly popular. The more skilled developers in said community hadn't coded their own versions of these resources, and alternatives to them were often few and far between. So, while the quality of the resources was terrible on a technical level, they filled a real user need.

If a well made solution to a problem doesn't exist, people will use whatever does, no matter how shoddy it might be.

On a more Script Archive related note, I also remember these scripts being recommended a lot in web development tutorials of the day. I never used them myself (since by the time I found real hosting services for my sites, things like PHP and MySQL had become the default online), but they were everywhere in the early days of the web.