CFML: apathy at work in the ColdFusion community

G'day:
The other day I knocked together an article "What I'd like to see in ColdFusion 2016 (redux, as is happens)", which lists a bunch of stuff I'd like to see in ColdFusion 2016. It was a bit of a speculative list, and just a way of getting people thinking about what they'd like to see in CFML, and perhaps go and actually participate in the future possibilities of their language.

I've cross-referenced each of the ideas I mention to a ticket (a new one, or an existing one if I could find one). Hoping people might go and have a vote or put their oar in or encourage more people to come up with their own ideas.

What I got instead of was 120 comments mostly revolving around how daft Acker Apple happens to be. I'm all for having this pointed out - especially as he seemed to revel in it - but there's more to ColdFusion 2016's possibilities than that, is there not?



I've not pored over all the tickets, but from the few I've looked at... there's been absolutely no input from the community at all. Neither to up vote, or disagree, or add some thoughts, or anything.

That's a bit frickin' pathetic, to be honest. Now I don't mind if people think my ideas are rubbish: that's absolutely fine in fact. But people should speak up. Participate in the shape of your language. Adobe does actually pay attention to the comments and votes (either way) on tickets.

If you don't use ColdFusion but do use Lucee... I thought perhaps some of the ideas I had might be good for Lucee. Seemingly not, as the only tickets I saw getting raised for Lucee were ones that I created. Apathy.

Or surely people have different ideas from me? Maybe someone wants <cfclient2>? Fine. Where's the ticket and the invitation to discuss?

We need to be participating in the decision-making process right now as they're planning ColdFusion 2016.

Obviously not everything everyone suggests makes it into the language. Indeed only a fraction of the suggestions do. But some of them do make it in, and we've gotta tell Adobe which ones are important to us.

Shelve yer apathy and go have a say.

For the record, here's links to all the tickets mentioned in that previous article:

• Improve quality of, marketing of and access to docs
• Have a package manager like RubyGems in CF
• CLI/REPL - probably via CommandBox
• Make all admin settings configurable by single plain-text config file
• Make CFAdmin a separately installable app
• Separate updater from CFAdmin
• Suggested revision to savecontent
• Everything is an object / Everything is an expression
• Formal mixins/traits for CFML
• Improve implicit getters/setters
• Expose the interfaces that dictate built-in types
• Range as a type and a literal
• More types are iterable
• IIFEs
• Futures/Promises
• Native event framework
• Implement Linq or some approximation thereof
• Null
• Static methods
• Improve Java integration
• CFC-based custom tags
• Bug 76175:(Watson Migration Closure)Summary: upgrade CF's regex engine
• Three-way comparison operator ( <=> ) & Comparable interface
• Iterators and generators
• Operator overloading
• Improve quality of, marketing of and access to docs
• OSGI integration for providing CF core modularity

Go do something about your language. Go on. Participate. Try to make a difference.

--
Adam

PS: can we all please accept this stipulation that Acker has one position on things, and everyone else has a contradictory but informed one, and that does not need further discussion. Thanks.