While I was driving home last week I listening to the "Hearding Code" podcast with Chris Williams (the organizer of jsconf) and I had a small revelation. Chris brought up how coders will use up one bad experience with a language to completely write it off and publicly denounce the it every chance they get. Raise your hand if this immediately makes you of think of ColdFusion. Me too.
Then I started thinking, JavaScript is one of the hottest languages around right now, and for good reason, it has evolved tremendously from where it was in the late 90's. Does that remind you of anything? If you are a ColdFusion developer it should seen very familiar to the language you use every day. Anyone who writes modern ColdFusion code will likely cringe at the code they wrote back in the pre-MX days, just like a lot of the JavaScript developers did in the pre-jQuery/Dojo/Sencha/Prototype/MooTools days.
Next time we hear someone publicly call out ColdFusion for a one bad experience they've had with an app that was written in the late 90's early 2000's lets remind them about JavaScript and the many bad experiences we've all had with it back in its early days. Lets also remind them how it has evolved into one of the most popular languages in the world.
ColdFusion, in my opinion, has evolved just as much as JavaScript. We have a great testing framework in MXUnit, lots of great MVC frameworks to chose from, and a number of other great frameworks that help us be productive such as Validate This, ColdSpring, Hoth, and Hyrule to name a few. These are all advanced programming frameworks that weren't around in the early days. In additon ColdFusion itself has also come a really long way as a programming language. We can how write code in a way that many programmers consider much more elegant and terse with the script updates in ColdFusion9. We can also use really powerful techniques like onMissingMethod, dynamic typing, and treating functions as first class citizens. We have ORM capabilities baked right in the framework, how cool is that?!?
While agree it has taken ColdFusion a long time to get this far while languages like Ruby, Python, and even PHP have progressed at a bit faster rate its good that we have gotten where we are. With the upcoming release of Zeus ColdFusion will take another step further with HTML5 controls built in, RESTful interfaces, closures, and a bunch more exciting features. These are exciting times to be a ColdFusion developer and I hope that we can advocate the language moving forward by drawing parallels to other languages, like JavaScript, that have had rough beginnings but are now considered "cool" languages.