
Coldfusion is “Unpopular” – I don’t care - timsayshey
https://dev.to/mikeborn/yes-coldfusion-is-unpopular-no-i-don-t-care-5f8c
======
jasode
_> 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/](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.

~~~
devoply
OTOH, all reasons are cons... an expert in an esoteric system with none of
those will be paid her weight in gold by the fewer employers in need of a very
finite resource... while js programmers are a dime a dozen.

~~~
Someone1234
If one language is expensive, and another language is cheap which do you think
employers will be building NEW software in?

I've seen people who follow the strategy you prescribe, and while they did
make above market while they helped companies migrate away from [dying
technology] they eventually became unemployable.

It simply isn't a good long term play, for either employee or employer.

~~~
bargl
It's a good endgame for an engineer. If you've got experience with X language
and you're planning your exit from the industry.

Better yet, be the guy who can upgrade a system like that from X language to
the newer one that can be maintained by the your new wave of engineers.

------
badrequest
> "Whilst y'all dimwits call us unpopular, we're busy running the world - from
> health and banking to government and Telco companies. Adobe's Evangelism Kit
> points out that Coldfusion is utilized by over 70% of the Fortune 100."

this is unprofessional and doesn't help drive your point. You're arguing that
"dimwits" perceive popularity as a good measurement of the value of a
language, and then you point to the language's owner's own bluster about how
popular it is in the industry.

I'd like to present an honest inquiry: who's life is made better by this
article? The "dimwits"? Coldfusion devs? My guess is neither.

~~~
smacktoward
The stronger argument is a few lines down:

 _> The kit also points out that 70% of Adobe Coldfusion customers are still
building new apps with CF - meaning that they still consider the platform
viable for future expansion._

If you believe that number (and I'm skeptical, but let's grant it for the
purposes of discussion), that indicates that CF is still a going concern in
most places that use it, rather than something cordoned off in a dark corner
as "maintenance mode." And people generally don't start new projects on
platforms they believe are going to go away soon.

Note, however, the shifting goalposts: we hear that 70% of Fortune 100
companies use CF, and then that 70% of "ColdFusion customers" are starting new
projects in CF, but that doesn't mean 70% of _Fortune 100 companies that use
CF_ are starting new projects with it. We have no idea how many of those big
enterprises that use CF still consider it viable. But by placing the two
numbers in sequence like that, the Evangelism Kit plants the suggestion in
your mind that lots of them do.

~~~
CydeWeys
I'd be curious to know which users at these companies are creating the new
Coldfusion apps. As a parallel, plenty of real business work gets done with
Excel spreadsheets by people all across a business organization, but that
doesn't mean that a new product actually being done by the engineering org
within a company is going to use Excel for a new software product (they
won't). It matters who these Coldfusion users are. Are they outside of
engineering?

------
bdcravens
I'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.

~~~
0xDEFC0DE
>Also the support from Adobe has waned substantially over the years. As a user
group manager I saw this in person.

Is Adobe Experience Manager eating Coldfusion's lunch that you could tell?

~~~
bdcravens
Not really, but it’s probably eating CF’s marketing budget - Adobe really puts
their energies into the enterprise products. One year at the Internet Retailer
show (my company exhibits) I stopped by the Adobe booth and introduced myself
as a CFUG manager. They didn’t even know CF was an Adobe product.

------
vkhn
The 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.

~~~
bdcravens
To be fair, there is an open source implementation. (We’ve run Railo/Lucee for
years on our old CFML code)

~~~
vkhn
You're right of course, but I'm betting that development didn't start with the
open source implementation.

~~~
borkyborkbork
We've done quite a bit of new development with the Lucee open source engine.
We switch back and forth between the open source engine and Adobe engine
depending on if we want the remote monitoring that comes with Adobe CF.

------
tptacek
A 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).

~~~
bdcravens
As the article indicated, there are new releases, both in Adobe's proprietary
version and the open source version (Lucee). Foundeo is a company built around
CFML security tools (scanners and a WAF), and they release lockdown guides
that are kept up to date.

[https://www.foundeo.com](https://www.foundeo.com)

[https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/coldfusio...](https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/coldfusion/pdfs/coldfusion-2018-lockdown-
guide.pdf)

I think it's the CF applications that aren't being maintained that are the
biggest risk (and there's plenty of those) - Adobe has indicated which version
are EOL:

[https://helpx.adobe.com/support/programs/eol-
matrix.html](https://helpx.adobe.com/support/programs/eol-matrix.html)

~~~
wglb
Scanners and WAF are, in general, not useful security tools.

------
eljimmy
I 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.

~~~
WorldMaker
ColdFusion also suffers technically from most of the same reasons PHP is
historically legitimately unpopular as a technical choice: confusing client-
side and server-side markup in the same files, making it hard to share code
cleanly between modules, often "encouraging" bad software architectures simply
because they are the most convenient to page layout. (Certainly there are
workarounds to such technical projects in both CF and PHP (and especially PHP
today).

ColdFusion does everything that PHP does poorly, with the added bonus that you
are paying for it, and there's never been the excuse that ColdFusion just runs
"everywhere" like PHP had during the early internet.

~~~
bdcravens
Both PHP and ColdFusion have frameworks (Laravel and Coldbox for example) to
address this. Without Rails or Sinatra, Ruby web apps would have the same
problems.

~~~
WorldMaker
I acknowledged there are workarounds/frameworks, and I especially recognized
that modern PHP is often a different beast from classical PHP problems.

Ruby wasn't built to be embedded inside HTML, so I don't Ruby would have the
worst problems of classical PHP even if Rails didn't exist, just as Perl
(which both PHP and Ruby took inspirations from) even at its worst CGI
architectures never quite had the same raw architecture problems that were
rampant in early page-based mixed HTML and PHP design. The trade-offs for
those architecture problems was development speed and "ease of use", PHP
succeeded so well on the early internet almost precisely because of such
problems.

ColdFusion too presumably succeeded as much as it did in Enterprise because of
those problems in that space (easy to sprinkle a bit of server-side code in
the middle of a page at will), though with no excuse for being free or easy to
host. It's unfortunate that that also leads to the legacy of spaghetti code it
will perhaps eternally have left behind in big-E Enterprise.

------
shagmin
Coldfusion has a unique place in the world of programming languages. In its
prime it was a great way to get a website started with minimal effort, similar
to PHP. Both PHP and Coldfusion let you create simple websites, easy to
deploy, full of spaghetti code. But with PHP's free/open source model, enough
people developed an interest in it outside of cubicle farms to really grow
their knowledge and the language, unlike Coldfusion... which became a hotbed
of corporate legacy code for junior developers to learn bad practices from.

Source: Was Coldfusion developer for approximately 10 years.

~~~
borkyborkbork
Yea... using a decent MVC framework like ColdBox or FW/1 should be required
for CF development.

You are correct with the spaghetti code comment, but I've seen worse in Java.

------
cogman10
Author, glad you don't care. You've failed to convince me that I need to learn
cold fusion now or in the future.

Let me tell a story. I know of a billing system that was written in IBM RPG.
Up until 2008ish, it was still being maintained and distributed. The guy that
wrote it was the sole owner and maintainer of this billing company and swore
up and down that RPG was the best language in the world and he'd never
consider writing in anything else.

But guess what happened? He couldn't hire anyone else to maintain this system.
Further, it was slowly and obviously decaying. Operating the system was a full
time job for 2 employees. Eventually the companies using that software
abandoned it for a solution that was maintained by a company that was both
larger and had a workforce of more than 1. Those companies cut their billing
staff to it being a part time job for just 1 person.

Why do I tell this story? Because you can literally replace "ColdFusion" with
"RPG" and you'll have the same article that guy would have written. That guy's
business is shutdown now.

Popularity IS important. Popularity feeds support and stability. The author is
free to cling onto a language that, frankly, I thought WAS dead. But he'd be
well advised to brush up on one of the more "Popular" languages and techs.

~~~
james-skemp
Minor quibble: it's spelled "ColdFusion." :)

------
sbr464
If using Coldfusion, I’d recommend scanning your sites with a service or
product like Tenable Security. There are quite a few high priority exploits
that we’ve seen over the recent years. These end up being available as one-
click takedown type scripts in tools like Metasploit.

~~~
bdcravens
Foundeo has several CF-specific security products (scanner, firewall, and
proactive scanner). I highly recommend.

[https://foundeo.com/](https://foundeo.com/)

------
xtracerx
Aggressive defensiveness of this calibre is not a good look and probably
reinforces any stereotype people have of developers who would consider
themselves ColdFusion devs. I don't think anyone would have a problem with
someone who is a dev, that does cold fusion. but to act like that's all you
are going to know and define your self that way is pretty lame.

------
mar77i
I don't get how you could think "interpreted XML" was a good idea. Great, you
don't need context switching the way PHP does it, but instead of properly
splitting templates and code, ColdFusion still mixes both while managing to be
less readable.

Added to that I feel unable to imagine a piece of indented 80 column wide XML
that doesn't somehow curl up on the right edge. It's certainly not for me, but
I won't tell you not to use anything.

Paraphrasing a thing I heard on the internet: XML is like violence, if it
doesn't solve your problem, maybe you need to use ColdFusion?

~~~
bdcravens
CFML isn’t just tagged based. It also has a c-style syntax (cfscript). A best
practice is to use cfscript for models and controllers, and tags for your
views.

------
sampleinajar
"Node is an excellent language to learn."

Am I the only one bothered by the author's repeated assertion that Node is a
language?

I should probably just take off my "Well, actually," glasses.

------
zamalek
I used CF in my first job more than a decade ago. It's not a terrible
language. I'm a bit sketchy on the details (having been more than a decade
ago) but I recall creating a custom tag that "magically" created an editor for
DB row (which in-turn used a custom tag for editing any column). It didn't run
in the browser, _but,_ apart from that, it felt a lot like using
React/Angular/Vue/Svelte/what-have-you. I quickly built up a library of custom
tags, which worked _really_ well in, what was essentially, a shop that was
mass-producing websites.

The awesome thing is that I bashed it out in one week, starting from knowing
no CFML at all. It was essentially me and my employer building websites (a 3rd
or 4th dealt with IT), and he was successful with my work within one day.

It's dumb, it's boring, it's uninteresting, and those are seemingly features.
I _love_ Vue and Svelte with a passion, but it takes more than a day to become
successful with those (and far longer to become wildly productive).

All of that being said, I don't care to go back to it.

------
cafard
"This doesn't hold up for the simple reason that dying languages aren't kept
up to date! Check out the list of COBOL releases on Wikipedia - frankly, only
two major versions released since 80's spells obvious doom for the COBOL
ecosystem.

Contrast this with Adobe Coldfusion, with four major releases since 2012"

Is that tongue in cheek?

------
hashberry
Ah, Macromedia ColdFusion brings back memories. I did enjoy how quick it was
to learn and modify pages. As long as Adobe continues to update, maintain, and
market Adobe ColdFusion (they seem to have a good track record), it'll never
be a "dead" language. There are advantages to corporate dollars.

~~~
wglb
Is their track record good with the security of their products?

------
convivialdingo
I spent a couple of years making CF webapps - it was a wonderful experience. I
wrote my own CFML interpreter for Linux at one point (before the Linux version
existed), but never really finished it.

------
JohnFen
The popularity of a language does not tend to correlate well with how useful
or good the language is for a given use, true. But it is not meaningless,
either.

If a language is popular, then companies are more likely to use it, if only
because the pool of engineers they can hire from is larger.

For example, two companies I've worked for have seriously debated shifting to
Java. Not for technical reasons, but because Java programmers are easy to
find, and often are cheaper. (Neither of them ended up making that shift,
though.)

------
est31
The google trend curve linked reminds me of the same graph for linux:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=l...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=linux)

Linux is NOT dying, quite the opposite, but I guess since 2004 more and more
non-technical people have come online who have nothing to do with linux.

------
leowoo91
Adobe is probably one of the companies who face decades of negative reviews
yet remains highly profitable.

------
cryptozeus
Great post...rabithole got me to this link and ...TIL
[https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-amazon-web-
service...](https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-amazon-web-
services.html)

------
jaequery
coldfusion has the coolest name of all the languages, I’ll give you that.

------
donatj
> Remember that thing called Ruby? You know, the scripting language powering
> Kickstarter, Soundcloud, Basecamp and Etsy?

I’m pretty sure Etsy is largely PHP. The creator of PHP works for them.

------
est
Was thinking about
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LENR/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LENR/) for a second.

------
pwnna
Is 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.

~~~
mhd
Huh, is cold fusion still a thing? I thought it went the way of the bussard
ramjet.

~~~
akvadrako
It says it's unpopular right in the title of the article.

~~~
mhd
I was talking about the nuclear version/free energy thing mentioned by the
parent. The language itself is probably more popular than the "tech", at least
it demonstrably works.

~~~
akvadrako
Cold fusion isn’t free energy - I don’t know where you got that idea.

~~~
parrellel
It is the way you identify any of the innumerable scams involving the idea of
cold fusion.

