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The ColdFusion Community Needs Some Daily Affirmation

Posted on Jun 01, 2009

I am beginning to feel that the ColdFusion community are in need of some serious self-esteem help. Repeat after me, ColdFusion community, "You are good enough, you are powerful enough and doggone it you have a solid user-base!"

Tell me if this sounds familiar, you are having some debate, online or off, about come coding related topic and inevitably someone trots out how the ColdFusion community is shrinking and that this proves that X [feature|framework|marketing plan] is absolutely [necessary|frivolous]. Generally speaking this is offered with little to no actual proof - at best we get a reference to TIOBE or that some company they know is dropping ColdFusion (and please don't even mention what GoDaddy hosting has to say). In the end, his point of feature X may be challenged but the assertion that the community is shrinking is left to stand. In fact, we, as a community often seem so obsessed with our size I want to build a project and call it cfEnzyte - it may not work but at least it might get us over our size obsession. We're like George Costanza telling other language communities "I was in the pool! I WAS IN THE POOL!"

Its like ColdFusion has its own personal Dick Cheney's running around proclaiming that the next <cfMushroomCloud> is just around the corner. That mushroom cloud comes in the form of any number of the things - the TIOBE index again, yet another acquisition, that CF isn't open source, that the cost is too high, that a certain indispensible person is leaving the product team or perhaps that "OO gurus" are scaring away new developers by making CF too complicated. This is all coming to pass on a ColdFusion community teetering on the edge of collapse and just a few BlueDragon.net licenses away from oblivion.

Except that it isn't true. Adam Lehman quoted new statistics showing that there are now 750,000 ColdFusion developers worldwide during the cf.Objective() keynote. While that may not have any .Net shops quaking in their boots, it does represent a 50% increase over the last numbers I recall quoted before the Adobe takeover. Nevermind that, but sales of ColdFusion 8 have been exceeding expectations (forget the actual quotes on that but they are good) and analysts like Gartner said that "ColdFusion is unmatched by any competitor for ease of use and technical capabilities" (see Kristin Schofield's post - or look up the recent awards). So, let's get it straight that the underlying premise is false. The ColdFusion community is, in fact, growing.

Nonetheless, these facts seem to have been overlooked or disregarded by the community when they were announced (probably because they don't fit the typical storyline). It's funny to me that as a community so obsessed with being not told we're dead, we're often too quick to proclaim ourselves at death's door. Sometimes it feels as though the best we can muster is, "It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do." Being mostly dead isn't the most welcoming message for growing the community and, clearly, its far from the truth.

Comments

hahaha "I was in the pool! I WAS IN THE POOL!". funny because its true. ColdFusion is wicked awesome, and I'm glad to be using it.

Posted By Matt Hill / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 1:21 AM

One great thing about Coldfusion: Standardization of common functionality. Since the most commonly used functionality is incorporated into all copies of CF, it is essentially standardized.
Although other languages can do most of the same things that CF can, oftentimes you must resort to third party tools.
Standardization comes in handy when reading someone else's code. With CF you don't have to search for external documentation (as often) because there are less third-party tools used and you already know exactly how the CF tags and functions work.
And if you do have to look up documentation, Adobe has it all there for you, readily available for all CF versions.

Posted By Russ / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 1:22 AM

I got a chuckle out of this. Great write up. :)

Posted By Todd Rafferty / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 7:25 AM

"Generally speaking this is offered with little to no actual proof"

I think that observation bears repeating. Whenever someone claims CF is dying, the instinctual reaction is to refute them, and we tend to overlook the fact that we're not being given anything more than an unsubstantiated opinion. Maybe our response needs to be a smile and "Oh, really? What kind of data do you have to support that claim?" And when they can't provide the data, share with them the statistics Adobe is providing (and I think it was said that the developer count actually came from a study done by a third-party, which lends it even more credence).

It's funny that you framed this post within the context of self-esteem issues, because one thing that stood out for me during this latest OO debate is that CF developers may be a bit self-conscious about their programming language and their development skills (and I'll admit to some self-doubt of my own on the latter one), but they don't give in to those fears.

A CF developer is not going to code in such-and-such a way just because a lot of folks say that that way is "the better way" or "the best way." If CF developers were content to follow the crowd or taking the safest programming career path, we'd have all switched to one of the more "popular" languages long ago.

And I think that's one of the flaws with this current OO debate: telling developers that they should adopt OOP because OO is at the heart of most of the other major programming languages or because it will make them more marketable in the job market isn't all that much different then telling a CF developer they should become a Java developer or a PHP developer. OO proponents are free to keep phrasing the issue in those terms, but should recognize that they may not convince CF procedural programmers, who have resisted the call to switch to more popular, OO-based languages, with that tactic.

The emphasis of the debate as to whether OOP is the best direction for ColdFusion should be focused on the technical pros and cons of such a decision given the architecture and abilities of ColdFusion, not on whether or not OOP is "better" than procedural programming.

And the more quantitative data that can be brought into the discussion (execution times, memory usage statistics for certain scenarios, documented use cases, etc.) to support the arguments, the better.

Posted By Brian Swartzfager / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 7:39 AM

[after AA meeeting]

My name is Brendan and I like coldfusion :)

I look after a coldfusion application that get over 2million coldfusion requests a day with average request times of less than 400ms.

Posted By Brendan / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 8:23 AM

cfEnzyte too funny

Posted By jim collins / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 9:01 AM

You are good enough!

Posted By Andrew / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 9:56 AM

I'd never heard of TIOBE prior to reading this post. I guess it would be kind of scary to go based on that alone since ColdFusion isn't even in the top 50. I did note, however, that TIOBE says this in its FAQ section towards the bottom:

"ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, Cocoa, and technologies such as AJAX."

So ColdFusion is considered a framework because it makes use of other languages such as JavaScript? Couldn't the same be argued for other web scripting languages such as PHP, which is ranked 4th on the list?

Consider me baffled.

Posted By Jose Galdamez / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 10:56 AM

FWIW. ColdFusion was ranked around 13 before TIOBE made that 'clarification'.

Posted By Adam Lehman / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 1:09 PM

Well said. Nothing to add.
Model that would make CF more popular is: free server + commercial IDE or to make CF server, by price, almost free.

Posted By Marko Simic / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 2:14 PM

After all of the Procedural vs. OOP negativity being thrown around these days, this was a much needed breath of fresh air! Thanks Bri!

Posted By Chris Diller / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 3:24 PM

Great Article.

Posted By Rudi Shumpert / Posted on 06/08/2009 at 8:35 AM

If ColdFusion isn't dying then why are there sooo few job postings in Denver for CF Developers? It won't matter once all the CF developers move over to .Net.

Posted By Rick Carson / Posted on 06/28/2009 at 2:03 AM

Rick Makes a good point. I think we as a CF community are quick to wonder whether CF is dying or has died not only because of what X technical expert writes in a blog or for a e-magazine, but the job market as well. I have coded CF for over 10 years and historically when you compare the job market for CF versus Java, .NET, or even PHP it tends to be a lot smaller. If you have a job that's not such a problem, but if you are either jobless or want to move to another job, then this becomes a problem fast. On the plus side when someone needs a CF developer you are a very hot commodity, because your skill set is unique. However, it makes it tougher to get a job when you're not so in demand. Granted this could be said about a lot of programming languages, but if CF wants to get away from this mindset, Adobe will need to do more to advertise the benefits of CF. Articles like the one the Gartner Group recently put out, do help as well as hard statistics, but Adobe will have to open up CF to open source and maybe make a cheap if not free alternative to compete with the PHPs of the world. CF suffers most from an image problem, which I think can be corrected with better PR from Adobe. .NET was considered a complete rip off of J2EE when it came out especially .NET with C#. Now look how Java developers are screaming for features C#/.NET offer. Adobe needs to let the people know CF is legit and put it out there as broadly as possible.

Posted By James White / Posted on 08/05/2009 at 11:50 AM