ColdFusion and Kevin Yank

So in August a good friend of mine Kevin Yank wrote a little paragraph for his August Tech Times newsletter for SitePoint.com in which he called ColdFusion "relatively stagnant". This leads the wonderful Ben Forta to email Kevin asking for clarification and post his thoughts on his blog. Well time passed and the September Tech Times Newsletter is posted and Kevin dedicated almost the entire newsletter to his article "The State of ColdFusion". His article goes through all kinds of reasons why he feels his comment that ColdFusion is "relatively stagnant" holds true, at least in his mind / eyes.

While we ColdFusion programmers are pretty used to "The Others" telling us and the world that ColdFusion is dead, dying, not real programming, not robust, yada yada yada. At least once or twice a year someone out there makes one of those comments and those new to ColdFusion panic and those of us who've been around try to calm their fears. We also see this kind of reaction whenever ColdFusion is acquired and shortly before a new version is announced. It's become status quo for the ColdFusion community and most of us to filter the misinformation out.

This time, it was different. If you read the comments posted at the end of Kevin's article you can see this. Jared Rypka-Hauer posted his thoughts as a comment and a blog post along with countless others in the ColdFusion community. I've also seen an increase in other ColdFusion bloggers doing comparisons between ColdFusion and other languages. Still more posts from people learning ColdFusion, crossing over to ColdFusion or just finding a new appreciation for this language.

For me, this was more personal then past ColdFusion controversies. You see, I know Kevin and I consider him a good friend. I also know SitePoint and most of the crew and consider them an extended online family. I've helped SitePoint grow to it's current powerhouse stature. I was the original Forum Administrator, served as an article writer, blogger and an active community member. I still have conversations with Matt and Kevin via IM at semi-regular intervals. We talk shop, but never languages (although Kevin and I have stepped closely towards that world on several occasions). You see, Kevin basically taught me PHP back in the day and started my web development career and for this I'm forever grateful. If I would have never learned PHP, I would never have moved into ColdFusion (different story for another time) and never have gotten to experience the truly awesomeness of ColdFusion.

Switching wasn't an overnight transformation for me and actually took me many months to complete. I struggled with ColdFusion at first (back in the days of MX) and thought it was illogical and didn't feel it was a true programming language because of all the tags I had to learn and use. I felt this way because I didn't understand it completely, I didn't know a lot of what was available to me and more importantly I didn't want to fully know it. I searched out help and couldn't find any and grew frustrated each and every day. I was beginning to think that ColdFusion was dying and on it's last leg. That a language without a community couldn't survive. Lucky for me my ColdFusion guru was a great guy and he helped me along, introduced me to the mailing lists and showed me where to get help. Gradually over time I became more proficient, and more involved in the community. To this day, I still find new and cool stuff about ColdFusion that I didn't know before.

So why does Kevin feel ColdFusion is "relatively stagnant"? Well, in my opinion, it's because he doesn't understand the language fully or the community which is behind it. He uses books sales, one blogger's complaints, job market strength, etc. to show his point. While these data points could all be considered valid metrics, I think ColdFusion is a different beast and can't be measured this way.

Kevin says via Tim O'Reilly that the ColdFusion book market is a flat line well below the other languages. I say duh! Ask any ColdFusion developer which book to buy to learn ColdFusion and I'm willing to bet that 100% of them say the ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit by Macromedia Press as either their first or second choice. We don't say this because it's one of the only books published. We say that because it is THE BOOK.

Running close to 4000 pages (index, code reference etc included) and being only the first part of really a two part series (there is also the Advanced Application Development book) we don't need another book. Also there is a great community of ColdFusion bloggers, websites, mailing lists etc out there all of which is there to help at the drop of a hat. Ask a PHP or ASP developer which book to buy and you'll have to take out a bank loan to buy them all. I know because I came from the PHP / ASP world before finding ColdFusion. I went from ASP 2/3 to PHP 3/4 to ColdFusion MX and along the way I've bought books left and right. In my basement i probably have 4 ASP book and at least half a dozen to a dozen PHP books but I only have 2 Coldfusion books and this is all I need.

Kevin also points to one ColdFusion developers dislike for the new reporting features in CF7. He uses an article published by Kay Smoljak in a recent issue of the Fusion Authority Magazine to outline problems ColdFusion has with a BRAND NEW reporting feature. Also the issues Kay has are a bit out there and lets keep in mind people this is a version 1 release of a new feature which we all know will only get better over time as Adobe learns more about what the community needs. It's also not a feature used by most developers, hence the reason why Kay is probably one of the few people being vocal about it. I can't imagine that PHP, ASP or even Ruby has ever launched and not had problems with some feature(s) not working 100% as they should 100% of the time on 100% of instances. Come on Kevin. You have to admit you were reaching here, or maybe you just thought you could exploit one person's issues as something bigger than they really are. Personally, I still think it's just because you don't fully understand the language.

Kevin goes on to talk about job market strength and lack of features (he mentions the impending CF 8 finally having built in Image manipulation support) in ColdFusion. When it comes to job hunting, I've done a lot of it, having moved from MD to AZ to AR to MD back to AZ and now to GA in a matter of 10 years. Each time looking for new web developer work and hopefully pay increases at each step of the way. When I was looking for PHP work I found lots of it, but a lot of it was crap work and I felt as if I was just a throw away employee. Hire him, get what you need and then drop him before we have to give him a raise. Rinse, Repeat as necessary. However when I did my ColdFusion job searches I was finding a lot more long term commitments and also a lot higher pay being offered. I was also seeing opportunities in a wide range of industries, government (federal and state), educational, private, small shops and big shops all across the country and parts of the world as well. Even today I'm on a ColdFusion job mailing list and there is stuff coming in daily for contract-to-perm work in various parts of the US and the world. The thing I learned is that yes you can go to the job boards to find work but most of the good jobs aren't found that way, especially in the ColdFusion world.

The jab at ColdFusion for not having built in image manipulation is just silly. It wasn't there because it wasn't asked for by the developers / community at large. Most of us have been using one of the many custom tags or CFC's which are freely available and very robust - Alagad being the most popular. Other needs are also being met by other developer-contributed code, tags and CFC's. This is much the way the popular FireFox browser has done things. There were many features not present in one version but users contributed code to add them in and over time the FireFox group has added them in as standard features, much like Adobe is doing with image manipulation for CF 8.

So is the ColdFusion Community "relatively stagnant"? Maybe to Kevin. But don't bust on him for his thoughts. I'm sure we can find someone out there who thinks PHP or Ruby is stagnant for reason X or Y.

I will say this: Kevin, you're in need of a good teacher. The next time you're in the States, look up a local ColdFusion User Group and get an education. I promise you that you won't be disappointed. And, if you want some 1-1 training, you know my IM!