A few days back I indicated some ire that a (IMO) wayward ER had been implemented for ColdFusion 2016: "ColdFusion: a piece of functionality should do one thing, and do it well". Poor old David Epler who raised it seems to feel a bit put upon cos it was something he raised three years ago, and with no further consultation Adobe have now implemented a solution. Without indication it was going to happen, or any communication with David about it, who now think it's perhaps not as good an idea as he originally might have thought.
This also got me thinking about another new feature in ColdFusion 2016: this whole ordered / sorted structs carry on (see "ColdFusion 2016: ordered/sorted structs"). Where's the ER for this one? I can't find one. So where did the impetus to do this work come from? Did Adobe just decide to do it off their own bat? If so why? Why the heck did they decide to do that work? Instead of any of a number of other features the community have actually asked for. Obviously there are probably some back channels via which people can ask for ERs - although there shouldn't be - but even if this came from some PHB or one of his minions at one of Adobe's special enterprise clients... why does this mean this is what gets implemented? All Adobe ought to say to the PHB et al in this case is "raise the ticket, engender some interest from the community, and let's see what people think".
Conversely the ColdFusion Team might have come up with this themselves. They really shouldn't do that, as - as far as I can tell - they are completely ignorant of CFML usage (I judge this based on everything they do and say about CFML, basically), so their decisions are not informed ones. But by accident they might have a decent idea... in which case they should... raise the ticket, engender some interest from the community, and let's see what people think. They definitely are not qualified by themselves to make decisions as to the direct on CFML.
I'm on the ColdFusion Pre-release Programme, and am under NDA to not divulge or discuss anything that gets mentioned on said programme (some people claim the PR has some sort of Fight-Club-esque rules about even mentioning it, or participation therein, but this is not true. They just want to make themselves come across as being "special". They do... but not in the way they think). So I won't. However I can speak freely on topics that have not had any discussion at all. And two of these are:
- Dave's issue about adding encoding functionality to <cfoutput>. This has been apparently implemented without any mention whatsoever on the pre-release.
- This sorted / ordered struct stuff. All I can say about that is that it exists in ColdFusion 2016. And there has been no discussion about its suitability or necessity for ColdFusion 2016 at all. Make of that what you will.
Here's an example of how it should be done, Here's the proposed schedule and feature-set for Java 9. There's no reason Adobe could not do that, at least at this high level. They could caveat the timeline with "all things being equal, and subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances", and they could caveat the feature list with "this is not a promise, but it's a guideline, and is also subject to change". We're all grown-ups and we understand things might prove tricky or not worth it, or something else might come along that's more important and needs to bump one of the "nice to have" features. And timeframes can change, etc. There's not even any commercial sensitivity to this, as ColdFusion isn't competing with anything. Well, other than "itself and its community" at times, I think.
PHP has similar timelines and have pretty organised RFC documentation these days for new features. I presume other language projects - well successful language projects - are similar.
Even LAS (those behind the Lucee CFML project, and the .lucee language) are heading in that direction, albeit in a more casual sort of way... but they're still finding their feet so it will probably round out as time passes.
I think the chief reason the ColdFusion Team don't take an inclusive communicative approach is that "inclusion" and "communication" are just devoid from their collective psyche, for whatever reason. They seem to treat their community with a degree of contempt that they seem to be "handing down manna from heaven" when they give us a ColdFusion release.
I think it's fine that Adobe marshal suggestions from their own team and from the "dark" part of their user base. But then they should open that up to the rest of the community so we can put our oar in. We have a great wealth of expertise in CFML usage to gauge how a feature might fit, and we've also got a great resource in the form of Sean Corfield who actually has designed languages in the past, so kinda knows how these things work (others in the CFML community might have experience here too, but I don't know about it). There's a few really old hands from the CAB and PR programme still around too, and they/we are kinda used to discussing how CFML should come together too.
Adobe have done a chunk of fine work in CFML, this is for sure. But they've also done some woeful shite, which I can't help but think never would have happened if they actually engaged their user base. As far as I can see there's no published plan for ColdFusion 2016, so I suspect there isn't really one. So it's not too late for them to kinda organise themselves a bit more, and include the rest of us in the language planning process. This would be bloody easy. For any public ER out there, simply tell us on Twitter or on Slack or on their own blog that they're looking at implementing it. And then encouraging people to have input. If there's not a public ER... create one, then do the same. Adobe have a vast pool of free planning resource. They should be using it.
Start using it.
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Adam
