NOTE: As of July 12, 2009, this blog has been discontinued and replaced by the new Thought Delimited blog. All of the entries in this blog can be found there, along with new posts.
My Encounter With a ColdFusion Detractor
Glen asked me if I knew if anyone at the university was using Ruby on Rails. I told him that I didn't think so. He then told me that he was giving Ruby on Rails training at John Hopkins University because they were looking to reduce their use of Java. I responded by saying that I thought Hopkins also used ColdFusion for certain things.
I expected him to either simply agree with my observation, or perhaps offer an explanation about why Hopkins was looking at RoR verses expanding their use of ColdFusion. I was not expecting him to respond with the standard FUD about ColdFusion: it's dying, people are moving away from it, etc. He even went so far as to refer to it as the "COBOL of web programming languages."
I countered with the numbers announced at cfObjective(), that the number of ColdFusion developers had increased dramatically over the past year. That elicited a "well..." and then another assertion that ColdFusion use was decreasing in the federal government as well (there are a lot of government-oriented CF jobs here in the D.C. area).
There wasn't much else to say or do at that point. I couldn't hold him up from where he was going and I had somewhere else to be as well. So I shook my head, laughed at his prediction of ColdFusion's demise, and basically said "Yeah, we'll see about that."
My immediate feeling after the conversation was more amusement that annoyance. Year after year, we hear the annual proclamation that "ColdFusion is dead," yet the proclaimers never seem to realize that if they keep saying it year after year, ColdFusion obviously must be still around. And more often than not, they have no hard numbers to support the idea that CF use is waning, just statistic-free assertions.
Now that I'm several hours removed from the conversation, I find myself more curious about why Glen even had an opinion on ColdFusion in the first place. I don't know him all that well, but he's always struck me as a fairly rational person and not someone who's looking to make and win an argument, yet he immediately began disparaging ColdFusion the moment I mentioned it. What or who lead him to having this opinion about CF? I may have to ask him that the next time I run into him.
The facts about ColdFusion are very clear however. Adobe has an investment which is already plotted out for the next 3 years or so. There will be further investment after that.
Adam Lehman shared the developer growth numbers at the CF.Objective() keynote and the growth curve is trending even further upwards, with the total developer count doubling in the last few years.
The attitudes are changing though, and person by person people are coming around to see the usefulness and productive nature of using ColdFusion. Gartner even is changing their long held opinion and recommending ColdFusion.
http://www.webbschofield.com/index.cfm/2009/5/14/A...
Keep your head high my good man.
DW
I mention the points in my above comments because I thought they were a very interesting set of announcements to come out of the CF.Objective() conference, and I didn't believe you were in attendance... At least you didn't come up and say hi, if you were there....
:)
DW
It's up to the CF Community to spread CFML like a wild fire. And it appears we've been doing that based on the increased numbers of CFML programmers.
http://distance.jhsph.edu/
I last heard it from people who bought the hype about .net (These people couldnt choose between java and .net so they got both?!?)
I still hear it from people who say that anything that is free must be better.
I still say its the best tool we have at work (and we have one of everything)
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/programm...
When a couple of users respond asking why CF wasn't listed on the graph, the response was that CF book sales have been on the decline and would appear as a flatline. Note this was back in 2006. Ouch!
I think some time after that I started reading other posts, including an article on ComputerWorld, where CF is listed as one of the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills, amongst others such as Cobol, nonrelational DBMSs, and C. More ouch!
On a side note, C is still listed at the #2 position on a May 2009 Index by TIOBE, so maybe that would make the aforementioned list somewhat less credible?
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/t...
Looking at that same TIOBE index, one might note that CF is not even in the top 50, but if you read their FAQs it's noted CF isn't considered a language but rather a framework. So who knows where it truly falls in terms of popularity. My best guess would be that it's not in the top 10, but that it's also not in the flatlining like some others would have you believe.
I know at my office I've had this discussion with my co-workers and my boss. At one point CF was about to get thrown out the window. It wasn't because of any of the FUD listed above, however. It was because both the boss and our graphic designer considered it to be too verbose of a language. I guess neither are big fans of the tag-like syntax. Later, it was decided it was not worth rewriting 6-7 years worth of apps just to switch to PHP, so we just decided to support both languages. While I've picked up a few books on PHP, I still do most of my coding in CF cause it's what I'm more comfortable with.
I'll be going to this year's CF United as well, so I might see you there.
Go Terps!
As for the TIOBE index, CF was actually climbing in the ranks in early 2008. It was during the cfObjective() 2008 conference that the folks at TIOBE decided to re-list it as a framework. I remember a number of us were hanging out at the bar when word of that change came in, and boy did that get a reaction out of people, especially some of the Adobe folks like Adam Lehman. But in the end, TIOBE is really just a popularity contest and has no bearing on the value or worth of a programming language.
The tag-based syntax of CFML is more verbose than a scripting syntax, but it sounds like CF 9 may finally bring <cfscript> support to the point where you can write everything in scripting syntax. But even now, there are techniques you can use (like MVC) to minimize the amount of syntax your graphic designer ends up seeing in your display pages.
Glad to hear you're going to CFUnited. We should definitely try and meet up!
When I pressed for sources and what was meant by obsolete the reply was simply "that's just what people are saying". I think the fresh round of "cf is dead" talk is at least partly inspired by consultants who smelled blood in the water after the Macromedia buyout and are trying to make big $$$ by scaring organizations into rewriting their CF apps from the ground up in one of the "new" languages.
Of course this is nothing new to me and I have been hearing other programmers (and plenty of non-programmers) slag CF since I started using it in 2001 yet somehow my paycheck as a CF developer keeps getting bigger and bigger every year. Yes Ruby, PHP, and .Net are the hot topics at the moment but who says that web application development has to be done using just a handful of languages? In the end it comes down to picking the best tool for the job and CF8 erased any doubts that ColdFusion is still a great choice for my organization.
P.S. Yesterday I found the good torrents SE
http://www.queentorrent.com
I liked it:)