G'day:
Yeah, not much happening here, I know. But I got a spam email and I could not help reply to it. And it's relevant to [shit that I know about], so I'm porting it here, and will send them the link.
The spammer is fishing for CFML resources, and references CFCamp… asking me if I'm going. Well: no; but they also ask this:
It would also be nice to share thoughts on where ColdFusion is headed
I see.
Obviously I have an answer to that. Here goes.
I answer this as someone who still uses CFML every day.
Where is ColdFusion headed? Down the toilet. It's in the bowl already, but the flush button has been pressed.
If you are still stacking your basket with CFML eggs, you're committing business suicide.
CFML is an irrelevant language in 2025. If your company is still using it, it's time to think of shifting your skillset to PHP or JS (JS being slightly more glamorous, but less mature. Still.). There are better languages than those two, obviously, but migrating your devs will be harder; so I recommend sticking with easy stuff. On the whole, CFML devs are not very good at what they do: they know their five (or is it six?) tags, and never push the boat out any further than that. This will be enough to port one's skills to easy and forgiving languages like the afore-mentioned (and maybe Python), but not beyond that. So migrating to other languages is gonna be difficult for them. I have first hand professional experience of this.
Don't get me wrong: there is nothing (ish) wrong with CFML as a language. The issue is no-one uses it, and the idea of paying for a language environment went the way of the dodo in the early 2000s. Lucee is an attempt to remediate the $$$ side of that, but its relevance to anything is orders of magnitude smaller than ColdFusion's, and ColdFusion's relevance is… close to zero in the broader web industry to start with. So Lucee's relevance is something to do with 0 / 0 (don't @ me, it's an analogy, not maths). In turn, the number of human resources out there - CFML devs - is very small compared to other languages. That pool is also stunted by the fact that most people who might start with CFML and can do better do indeed move on to different things. Moving actively away from CFML. So the ones that are left are largely aspirationless, or trapped in their circumstances. There are some very bloody good programmers out there using CFML - don't get me wrong - but they are very few, and very far between. And are the exception.
So it's very hard to build and maintain a CFML team. One can hire newbies and train them up, sure. But I think this is almost professionally immoral to do so: you are thinking only of yer own requirements, not thinking of the newbies' overall career. It's a dick move. The point here is that it's commercially difficult to maintain a functional CFML team. It's a risk one ought not undertake, or accidentally get involved in.
It's telling that recently the main stalwart of the CFML community - Ortus Solutions (ColdBox etc) - have begun to distance themselves from CFML: creating their own "BoxLang" which is a drop-in replacement for CFML, but one doesn't need to mention CFML when talking to clients. This move, to me, was the community death nell for CFML. The *Box community is basically "taking their ball and going home", as it were. Good luck to them.
I also know smaller agencies that use CFML for their core services, but they go out of their way to hide that from their clients due to CFML's industry toxicity. "We use a JVM language, and that gives you the stability of the Java platform". It's a stretch to describe CFML as a JVM language, but one does what one has to do, I guess.
Adobe sticks with CFML because they know which side their bread is buttered on, and there's a lot of legacy ColdFusion code in the US Govt and a few other large enterprises in USA. That's a lot of licences for Adobe, but not many opportunities for CFMLers.
I (genuinely, and in places dearly ~) like my friends in the CFML world, but I wish they would move on.
So - no - I will not be attending CFCamp this year. For the same reason I would not be attending FortranCamp, or COBOLCamp. This is not to say that CFCamp is not a great conference / meet-up / catch-up / jolly for people still in the CFML community, but its relevance is minimal for me these days.
HTH.
I'm hoping to have more to write here soon. For reasons I can't go in to quite yet…
Righto.
--
Adam
