Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care

I spent a couple of years making CF webapps - it was a wonderful experience. I wrote my own CFML interpreter for Linux at one point (before the Linux version existed), but never really finished it.

I used CF in my first job more than a decade ago. It's not a terrible language. I'm a bit sketchy on the details (having been more than a decade ago) but I recall creating a custom tag that "magically" created an editor for DB row (which in-turn used a custom tag for editing any column). It didn't run in the browser, but, apart from that, it felt a lot like using React/Angular/Vue/Svelte/what-have-you. I quickly built up a library of custom tags, which worked really well in, what was essentially, a shop that was mass-producing websites.

The awesome thing is that I bashed it out in one week, starting from knowing no CFML at all. It was essentially me and my employer building websites (a 3rd or 4th dealt with IT), and he was successful with my work within one day.

It's dumb, it's boring, it's uninteresting, and those are seemingly features. I love Vue and Svelte with a passion, but it takes more than a day to become successful with those (and far longer to become wildly productive).

All of that being said, I don't care to go back to it.

I don't get how you could think "interpreted XML" was a good idea. Great, you don't need context switching the way PHP does it, but instead of properly splitting templates and code, ColdFusion still mixes both while managing to be less readable.

Added to that I feel unable to imagine a piece of indented 80 column wide XML that doesn't somehow curl up on the right edge. It's certainly not for me, but I won't tell you not to use anything.

Paraphrasing a thing I heard on the internet: XML is like violence, if it doesn't solve your problem, maybe you need to use ColdFusion?

Author, glad you don't care. You've failed to convince me that I need to learn cold fusion now or in the future.

Let me tell a story. I know of a billing system that was written in IBM RPG. Up until 2008ish, it was still being maintained and distributed. The guy that wrote it was the sole owner and maintainer of this billing company and swore up and down that RPG was the best language in the world and he'd never consider writing in anything else.

But guess what happened? He couldn't hire anyone else to maintain this system. Further, it was slowly and obviously decaying. Operating the system was a full time job for 2 employees. Eventually the companies using that software abandoned it for a solution that was maintained by a company that was both larger and had a workforce of more than 1. Those companies cut their billing staff to it being a part time job for just 1 person.

Why do I tell this story? Because you can literally replace "ColdFusion" with "RPG" and you'll have the same article that guy would have written. That guy's business is shutdown now.

Popularity IS important. Popularity feeds support and stability. The author is free to cling onto a language that, frankly, I thought WAS dead. But he'd be well advised to brush up on one of the more "Popular" languages and techs.

In the long run we are all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes

For some, the short term payoff is the right strategy. Also how is it not good for the employer? Assuming they could fire the person (or just hire him/her as contract).