That is just so awful...

I was watching a video about Django, a Python powered web framework, when the presenter, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, made the following comment (at around 29:22):

I've actually seen a system, I shit you not, that has every single URL on the site calls a stored procedure in an Oracle database that generates html in the stored procedure and returns it to the web for display. I'm not joking! That is just so awful I can't even start to begin...

That comment took me back a few years where I encountered just such a mess. I was brought into the organization to introduce Java and J2EE but the developers that lived there already had this Oracle solution in place. For reasons that I still don't understand to this day, they couldn't see that this was one incredibly awful idea. In any case, the next time you find yourself looking at some ugly bit of Java or Ruby or whatever, just remember it could be a lot worse!