ColdFusion is born again, IMO

I was just reading ColdFusion is NOT Dying over on Adam Fortuna's blog, and after watching all the commentary over the past several days about the recent Computer World article claiming the opposite I just couldn't resist chiming in this time. It's an issue that grates on my nerves occassionally, although I admit I once used to be guilty of it myself...

Adam writes:

"The main problem isn't this article though, it's that the author isn't alone in their view. The "outside world" doesn't hear much about ColdFusion. How often do you see things on Digg, Del.icious or the Technorati top 100 blogs that mention ColdFusion in a good light? Chances are it's rare, or more likely next to never. The lack of publicity drives a product to obscurity! I wouldn't be surprised if most peoples opinions about how "bad" CF is is based entirely on this obscurity (well, and bandwagon effect)."

Yes, yes, yes and yes!...

It's entirely true, and I know because I've been there. I've been on the other side of the fence where I thought ColdFusion was just a kiddie tag-based scripting language with cfif's and cfloop's and not much else.

6 or 7 years ago the CF examples I saw were terribly basic and had a whole bunch of ugly, uppercase tags mixed in with the HTML. I'd already been using PHP for a couple of years and knew that mixing logic and presentation was a terrible way to do things. I was also using Java and getting into OO which ColdFusion just couldn't deliver at the time. ColdFusion just didn't look like a "real" programming language - and I bet that's something you've heard time and time again.

Another issue, as a younger developer at the time, is that CF wasn't free. People still claim that the price isn't a contributing factor to lack of adoption, but it was to me and I am certain it is to others. When you're a teenager with no cash which languages would you start playing around with? Any of the free ones. When you're a university student, still with no cash, which languages would you be tinkering with? The free ones. When you leave university, you're probably going to get a job using the languages you're most comfortable with, because you've been using them for 3+ years. ColdFusion doesn't get a look-in here, and I believe that's where the problem really starts (at least for the developers who are currently around 25 years or younger), or rather where a solution could be found...

So... What has changed in 6 or 7 years? Well obviously I stopped snobbing ColdFusion :P But ColdFusion has changed. It is one of the few languages that has been improved dramatically over the years. To be honest I didn't sit up and take notice until well after CFMX6.1 was released. CFMX6 was a significant release, you could almost say it was CF born again, but who knew it? Is that where MM dropped the ball, or was I just out of the loop - and if so, which loop did I have to be in? After all I did spend a lot of my time reading many programming-related sites and journals, but CF almost never got a mention.

And while ColdFusion has changed I think it is the misconceptions about ColdFusion as a language that haven't changed a bit. The "outside world" doesn't know the true power and capabilities of ColdFusion because the misconceptions formed long ago and I guess people assume that things are still the same. If other languages don't change so drastically in such a short time period, why would people think CF is any different?

Adobe have a chance to change this in the next couple of months - CF8 is going to rock our world with an amazing array of new features that will really drive web development for us. ColdFusion is born again, again. But will the "outside world" know about it this time? I don't know whether it will take some good marketing on Adobe's part, or a push from us in the CF community to build good CF8 demos, or whether it will take a truly free version of CF for it to really hit the headlines. All I know is that I would love to see a flood of new developers have their eyes opened to how cool ColdFusion is, and I'm hoping that it will happen with this release.