ASP.NET - Name Ambiguous by Nature?

First of all, I have to mention that this colleague has been a C and ASM programmer for most of his lengthy professional career, I won’t mention his name here but let’s just call him “Joe the Programmer” in light of current braindead naming schemes.

Joe the Programmer recently started programming with the .NET framework but yesterday came to a stop. When he was asked to help out with .NET development using ASP.NET, he took some time and to his amazement couldn’t find the ASP.NET programming language in the Visual Studio “new project” dialog.

At first this made me chuckle and I brushed it off, but then I realized he was correct to assume that there should be an ASP.NET programming language. After all, there used to be an ASP programming language although it looked suspiciously much like BASIC.

After explaining that ASP.NET is not as much a language but a technology, he went on his way and continued programming.

This all made me think that maybe the name, ASP.NET, is ambiguous, vague and might be a concept difficult to grasp for guys like Joe the Programmer. I just hope that he has a concept of OOP to go along with his newly found knowledge of ASP.NET.