Softwaredeveloper.com is running an article about failed/unpopular programming languages, Ghosts in the Machine: 12 Coding Languages That Never Took Off. In that list are items such as PowerBuilder, rebol, vrml, smil, delphi, etc. Now, I could take issue with vrml and smil, and probably a few others as being markup languages more similar to HTML than to actual programming, but I’m not going to argue that point. The point I’m going to argue is their inclusion of our ever-lovin’ Coldfusion in that list.
Their claim is that “… ColdFusion has been slowly displaced by ASP.NET and PHP, which offered a MySQL integrated product in a free open-source form.” I don’t know that I buy that. Actually, I take that back. I do know that I don’t buy that. PHP has a lot more mindshare because of it’s open source nature, that’s a given. And I think ASP/.NET has advanced primarily because of the backing of Microsoft.
So, I don’t think it has anything to do with MySQL integration, because you’ve been able to do that on CF for quite some time (although it did used to be a bit more difficult than it really needed to be, especially if you used Solaris).
CF is not a failed or dead language. It is very much alive with no less than 4 different runtimes (Adobe’s official Coldfusion,New Atlanta’s BlueDragon (my personal favorite, with a free version!), Railo, and the recently open sourced Smith Project. In fact, although it may not be that popular from a developer perspective, it may well be the most executed web development language on the net today.
It’s got an active and vibrant developer community, doing a lot of great things, and a new major release of Adobe CF8 “Coming Soon” (the public beta is out, and IMHO, it’s a great improvement over 7). It’s even got loads of open source frameworks (if that’s your cup of tea), and an IDE through avery actively developed plugin for Eclipse, cfEclipse, that supports all 4 of the implementations, and the frameworks. CF8 adds even more Eclipse integration with debugging support, wizards, etc.
CF took off. It’s just not an eagle that everbody can see flying up high. It’s more like an insect, spread far and wide, but doesn’t get noticed even though it’s right under foot.
