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Ask HN: Why no Coldfusion love?

10 points by aepearson ↗ HN
Honest question here. Coldfusion was the first language I learned for web development...in fact, I'm pretty sure it was one of the first (and most popular) languages for quite some time period. Don't quote me on that.

It's come a LONG way in recent years, and of course the Railo project exists now...so no more paying license fees.

I'm curious - why do I NEVER hear modern day devs talking about it or using it?

In my experience it's one of the most natural and fast (in terms of development time) languages I've ever used.

What am I missing here?

25 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] thread
rmason
I've given up worrying about it, think of CFML as our secret weapon OK?
bdw429s
I talk about CFML all the time on my blog and Twitter. If you want to hear more chatter about CF, I suggest you start talking about it more too :)
aepearson
How can I find you on Twitter? Maybe I can join in ;)
bdw429s
I'm @bdw429s on the tweety pages and my blog is codersrevolution.com It's just as important that we're vocal outside of the little ColdFusion circles though. For instance, attend a non-CF conference and talk to people about CFML. I do :)
aepearson
Full disclosure - because of some of the flack I've gotten as a CF developer I'm actually a bit self conscious about it. I'm glad you spoke up here!
bdw429s
That's not uncommon. I actually like to tell people I program in CFML just to start conversations :) For some CF apologetics, see my recent response to a PHP programmer:

http://www.codersrevolution.com/blog/cfml-good-discussions-a...

But to your larger point, non-CF devs don't talk about CF because 1) They aren't familiar with it's recent state 2) The CF world isn't doing cool stuff that catches their attention.

It's my belief that the more CF devs do cool (and modern) stuff with CF and then talk about it outside of their little microcosm, the more visibility it will get again and start to shake it's "legacy" label.

larrykubin
It was the first technology I learned for database driven web development in 2003 and I got plenty done with it at the time. It really made it easy to get started since it was simple to write and understand. But when I changed positions and stopped working in a "ColdFusion shop", I learned PHP and Python, and haven't seen a need to check back in to see how ColdFusion is doing over the past 10 years. I began freelancing, and people often want things like Wordpress and Drupal customizations, or for you to install a bulletin board, or want you to know Django or Flask. The demand for ColdFusion developers just isn't there so that knowledge has mostly been erased from memory.
bdw429s
Even if it's just for personal play, you should look at CF again. A lot has happened in 10 years :) I'm biased since I'm involved in these projects, but I think ColdBox MVC, ContentBox CMS, and CommandBox CLI & package manager are great examples of of how CF can be modern and productive today.
aepearson
I think if the average web developer, who had never tried CF, took a look at how easy it is to interact with DBs in CF....they'd probably be a bit shocked at how stupid easy it is. Definitely a strong point.
davidgerard
At the time Cold Fusion was the thing that made PHP seem like a better idea by comparison.

It'll have a lot of work to get away from that reputation.

jasonkester
Sounds like you might not have been around back then. PHP was the thing you used because Cold Fusion Cost $50,000 per server to deploy.

Apart from that, it really was the best of its breed (compared to PHP, classic ASP, Perl CGI, or Java Servlets).

davidgerard
Yeah, that was the main "better" feature :-)

And it turns out to have been the killer.

To bring back ColdFusion, you'd need some substantial useful tools written in it. The way PHP support is buoyed along by WordPress, forum software, photo site software, etc.

bdw429s
I actually happen to think the tooling around CFML isn't all that bad. (The link in one of my other comments elaborates more) Can you give me some examples of tooling that CF doesn't have? I've found a lot of people just aren't familiar with what's out there.
davidgerard
No I can't, but that I can't is pretty much the problem I'm stating: that people need to think of it as useful for things, not as "oh, that was that template thing they used in the nineties." I'm talking about public image here, not tawdry reality.
aepearson
David, I can't help but to feel like you are making a REALLY good point. CF only has a few outspoken advocates. Popular ones that I can think of I can count on one hand.

It's definitely not "cool" among the startup culture, which seems to drive a lot of the language popularity.

davidgerard
So it needs lots of "Show HN: Cool thing I made with Cold Fusion" and first comment lots of details as to why CF was totally the right toolkit.
yellowapple
Probably for the same reasons Flash and Dreamweaver aren't discussed at any particular length around these parts.
aepearson
I don't understand the parallel. You mean, being that the three are originally Adobe products?
jpetersonmn
Our internet ticket/support site is built in CF. We can never get enhancements or bugs fixed. We're just told that we don't have any cold fusion devs any longer, etc... Instead of getting some things fixed up, unfortunately we're moving to a salesforce system.
scmoore
I wonder a lot of the same things. I just started picking up CF since that's what we use at work. I consider it a character-building exercise but I don't hold out hope that knowing it will bring me enjoyable work in the future.

It seems a lot like PHP in some respects -- there's a lot of hacky CF code out there from the dark ages of web development, so maybe folks are just judging the language by that. Or maybe it's the Adobe association. They've got kind of an evil-empire vibe that I can't quite articulate (and could be imagining).

In 20 years, maybe CFML devs will be like those mythological COBOL folks who got lured out of retirement with huge contracts to prop up awful old enterprise systems once the kiddies stopped learning it.

macarthy12
I was heavily involved with CF back in the beginning version < 1, when it was an Allaire product, and at the time is had some good points, comparing it to perl, c or ASP of the time. But it has been blown away in nearly every segment but other languages and frameworks. Only think it might be better at is integration with flash, which no should care about...
bdw429s
Can you be more specific about the segments where CF has been "blown away"? I think it's more modern than most people realize, but it's hard to respond to a criticism that vague :)
aepearson
I'm curious about which bits have been "blown away" compared to other languages and frameworks.

I've done testing versus PHP for basically every sort of function related to web development (for my workflow) and can't think of an instance where one was better over the other in terms of speed...however CFML always won out in terms ease-of-coding (example: CURL -vs- cfhttp, db queries, REST API development, XML Parsing, etc.)

I can't say I've ever used Flash for anything on the web ever. I think it's nice that CF makes it easy, real easy, but I have never needed to use flash for anything.