The (ColdFusion) Natives Are Restless
I've noticed a theme this past week in CF blogs. More and more people have been commenting on the usefulness and proliferation of ColdFusion and just generally railing against the whole CF is Dead mentality that incessantly dogs us. I'm kind of curious what has gotten us stirred up lately. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying the passion it is revealing in the community.
The CF is dying/dead/antiquated/hopeless/lame/etc arguments are the proverbial dead horses that for some reason or another we all like to drag out and beat every now and then. In some cases, they're overdone and mostly annoying rants. In fact I even cringe writing this post because I hate to add to that sort of noise.
I guess I just care too much. I can't read these debates without getting emotionally pulled in. It's not the fact that people dislike or even disregard CF that bothers me. It's mostly just the misinformation that really nags me. Seriously, I'll be lying in bed that night just thinking of all the misinformation out there and how I wish I could personally confront each of those people and explain how they are wrong. I wouldn't mind if they still though CF was lame as long as they had the straight facts first.
- There's no step debugger
- There's no IDE with code completion
- There's no documentation
- There's no community
- There's no good frameworks
- A tag-based language can't be taken seriously
- You can't use it for free
- It's slow
- No one really uses it
These are the kinds of things I see people saying over and over on the stack overflows and slashdots of the world and I just can't stop thinking about it. Some of you probably think I have some psychological problems here, but I'm telling you I can't not take it personally.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I can do on a broad scale to help the reputation of CF, and frankly I don't know if I've really came to any solid solutions. That's partially why I started this blog-- because I think the best thing a lot of us can do is just continue filling the Internet with useful, positive information about the tools we love. Of course, I can't make anyone read my blog or any other blog for that matter. Heck, I rarely run across .NET blogs-- but that's probably because I only read CF aggregators and Google CF-related topics.
So I'm not entirely sure why I even bothered to write this post other than to get some of this off my chest and show just how hopelessly in love with CF I am. Please tell me I'm not alone :)
In the mean time I hope the CF community keeps doing what it does best-- being passionate about the things we love and spreading solid information around.
It is because you are sick of it. And so am I. You have a lot invested in CF, you are passionate about it and it pisses you off that ppl talk trash with out not knowing WFT they are talking about. What motivated Aral to write such dreck is beyond me. I guess it is cool to dis.
Oh, how I wish I could go back in time and make MySpace turn out differently. While talking to MIke Brunt at Max this year he (who used to be a consultant for Macromedia) said he thought Macromedia should have done more to help them out with their problems before they went over to their BD/.NET solution. In fact, he said he brought it up to Macromedia but they didn't pay attention.
You know, I was thinking the other day, it would be fun to have an open competition between the CF, .NET, PHP and whoever else wanted in. Sort of a battle of the languages where a team representing each stack had to build a specific app and be graded on speed of development, amount of code, simplicity, and stress testing. That would be so much fun, but there would also be so many problems actually doing it.