Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
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Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#2I've been involved in CF since 1999. I'm the manager of the Houston CFUG (though we are transitioning to a very well known name in the CF world as the new manager), spoken at some CF confs, appeared on some podcasts talking about CF (even non-CF ones), and was a technical reviewer for a v5 title.
However about 6 years ago I made the transition away from CF to Rails (not for jobs - in my role I pick the technology stack). The Rails ecosystem is so much richer (and most of what I'd compliment there is true of other languages as well). Great package management, great tools (for example, Code Climate started as Ruby/Rails tool), great devops story, and more.
There's a lot I think CF still is advantageous for (the admin UI, easy debugging via CFDump, in-memory SQL engine to query against recordsets, etc). However, there's a lot it doesn't include. Easy ability to use environment variables. Background processing (Ruby's Sidekiq replaced in one line what I had spent years writing in CFML, because no one was trying to solve the problem etc) Etc
Also the support from Adobe has waned substantially over the years. As a user group manager I saw this in person.
I'd still do CFML, happily. I also would work in any other language I know, or do devops work. However, I've noticed alot of developers who cling to ColdFusion like they owe it allegiance. They beat the "ColdFusion's not dead!" drum even though the job market is pretty clear for the technology. It's a decent language, but it's just a tool.
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#3Is there something we can do to the title to distinguish the Coldfusion language with nuclear cold fusion? The title seems applicable to both and even the first paragraph could be misleading if you assumed the latter.
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#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 : blog posts, tutorials, books, Google searches, StackOverflow, etc. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/979/)
3) large ecosystem with lots of 3rd-party libraries, open source repos, etc so one doesn't have to invent everything from scratch
4) the language is continually enhanced with the latest technical features to stay up-to-date - e.g. Delphi didn't have 64bit compiler support for a long time (~2011?) even though C++ had that ability for years. That drove away many programmers that needed to access more than 4GB of RAM.
The common theme to all those bullet points is that programmers are using "popularity" as a rough cost-benefit analysis of investing time into using it. They know programming doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#5I 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.
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#6Is there something we can do to the title to distinguish the Coldfusion language with nuclear cold fusion? The title seems applicable to both and even the first paragraph could be misleading if you assumed the latter.
well one is real and the other is not so you could start there lmfao
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#7Is there something we can do to the title to distinguish the Coldfusion language with nuclear cold fusion? The title seems applicable to both and even the first paragraph could be misleading if you assumed the latter.
not to be glib but the fact that its Capitalized and one word rather than 'cold fusion', should be enough no?
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#8A year or two ago I would have replied that ColdFusion is actually dead, and that using it or really, even, maintaining applications in it is irresponsible, because it's virtually impossible to secure. But I think it may have become so archaic that vulnerability researchers aren't really hitting it as much any more? Maybe you've weathered the storm, and CF will be safe to use from here on out?
(Obviously: don't use ColdFusion).
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#9The problem with Coldfusion isn't with it's popularity, usefulness or value. It's with Adobe and the cost of licensing.
The only reason right now someone would choose Coldfusion over literally anything else free is their existing skill. That's the very definition of dying out.
The other problem with Coldfusion is the community that all seem to have this same chip on their shoulder.
Re: Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care
#10coldfusion has the coolest name of all the languages, I’ll give you that.