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Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

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Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#31

Post by WorldMaker »

eljimmy wrote: post #5

I don't really care much for language popularity, but I think the case to be made, as can be for any language of waning popularity, is the pool of developers who are available for hire. ColdFusion is also unpopular for an important fact: it's proprietary and their licenses aren't cheap.

ColdFusion also suffers technically from most of the same reasons PHP is historically legitimately unpopular as a technical choice: confusing client-side and server-side markup in the same files, making it hard to share code cleanly between modules, often "encouraging" bad software architectures simply because they are the most convenient to page layout. (Certainly there are workarounds to such technical projects in both CF and PHP (and especially PHP today).

ColdFusion does everything that PHP does poorly, with the added bonus that you are paying for it, and there's never been the excuse that ColdFusion just runs "everywhere" like PHP had during the early internet.

Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#32

Post by CydeWeys »

smacktoward wrote: post #21
badrequest wrote: post #14

> "Whilst y'all dimwits call us unpopular, we're busy running the world - from health and banking to government and Telco companies. Adobe's Evangelism Kit points out that Coldfusion is utilized by over 70% of the Fortune 100." this is unprofessional and doesn't help drive your point. You're arguing that "dimwits" perceive popularity as a good measurement of the value of a language, and then you point to the language…

The stronger argument is a few lines down: > The kit also points out that 70% of Adobe Coldfusion customers are still building new apps with CF - meaning that they still consider the platform viable for future expansion. If you believe that number (and I'm skeptical, but let's grant it for the purposes of discussion), that indicates that CF is still a going concern in most places that use it, rather than something co…

I'd be curious to know which users at these companies are creating the new Coldfusion apps. As a parallel, plenty of real business work gets done with Excel spreadsheets by people all across a business organization, but that doesn't mean that a new product actually being done by the engineering org within a company is going to use Excel for a new software product (they won't). It matters who these Coldfusion users are. Are they outside of engineering?

Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#33

Post by guitarbill »

bdcravens wrote: post #18
devoply wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, all reasons are cons... an expert in an esoteric system with none of those will be paid her weight in gold by the fewer employers in need of a very finite resource... while js programmers are a dime a dozen.

I definitely see better rates for CF contracting. I’m sure the same is true of FORTRAN.

Weirdly enough, this isn't necessarily true. Articles keep popping up about a shortage of FORTRAN or COBOL programmers. Yet when you look into it, they pay comparatively poorly... which explains the "shortage". I think this might be because there's still enough retired folks willing to contract a bit on the side. (And FORTRAN is not so bad.)

On the other hand, you can definitely demand obscene hourly rates for old, clunky stuff most people don't want to touch. Sharepoint is one example I know of. (Not to imply CF is clunky, but the worse the workflow, the higher the rate, obviously.)

Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#36

Post by CydeWeys »

eljimmy wrote: post #5

I don't really care much for language popularity, but I think the case to be made, as can be for any language of waning popularity, is the pool of developers who are available for hire. ColdFusion is also unpopular for an important fact: it's proprietary and their licenses aren't cheap.

The proprietary nature of it has really stunted it in the long term. Students aren't learning it in school because there's plenty of free (in all senses of the word) alternatives available, such as Python or NodeJS.

I think the overall marketplace has shown pretty clearly that proprietary languages are doomed to insignificant market share at best, outright failure at worst. The writing was really on the wall when Microsoft opened up all of .NET.

Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#38

Post by newshorts »

badrequest wrote: post #14

> "Whilst y'all dimwits call us unpopular, we're busy running the world - from health and banking to government and Telco companies. Adobe's Evangelism Kit points out that Coldfusion is utilized by over 70% of the Fortune 100." this is unprofessional and doesn't help drive your point. You're arguing that "dimwits" perceive popularity as a good measurement of the value of a language, and then you point to the language…

Agreed. The article’s purpose seems To be a statement about how the author doesn’t really care what people think about his language choices. Yet he put time and energy into writing an article about this, contradicting how much he says he cares.

Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#39

Post by spork12 »

Well, you have to pay for the runtime. That makes it pretty hard to compete. That business model works fine for things like Adobe's Creative Suite where there aren't many good free alternatives, but it's not very good for programming languages and web frameworks.

A lot of the momentum in things like JVM/React/Angular/Rails/Django/.NET came from them being free to use.

Free to use has historically lead to a rich community, and an eldorado of open source libraries.

Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

#40

Post by Someone1234 »

devoply wrote: post #15
jasode wrote: post #4

>And, more important… does it matter? If author wants to continue using CF for his own reasons, that's fine but it's still worth knowing why others care about popularity : 1) job prospects - e.g. knowing Javascript will have more relevance in job hunting than knowing Microsoft's VBScript that was used in Internet Explorer 8. 2) large community that has seen similar problems and can provide answers to copy&paste code…

OTOH, all reasons are cons... an expert in an esoteric system with none of those will be paid her weight in gold by the fewer employers in need of a very finite resource... while js programmers are a dime a dozen.

If one language is expensive, and another language is cheap which do you think employers will be building NEW software in?

I've seen people who follow the strategy you prescribe, and while they did make above market while they helped companies migrate away from [dying technology] they eventually became unemployable.

It simply isn't a good long term play, for either employee or employer.

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