Sorry, but choice of language means more than nothing. ColdFusion is pretty dead-end and not a particularly good choice these days for a variety of reasons.

Let me break it for you, nobody except you and some opinionated programmers on the web, cares what language you wrote website X or web app Y in. If it works, and you are able to maintain it - you won't hear a single word of praise from the 'users' congratulating you on your stellar choice of language. They'll rip you to shreds when it stops working but even then they'll never tell you off for choosing the wrong language.

If it works, and you can maintain it - its all good. Even Cold Fusion, even PHP, even Perl, even Brainf#@k

I understand your point of view, and in specific cases, the choice has little practical impact. However, when a business is dependent on an aging technology (language/framework/etc), the choice can have real consequences. As one example, when that very competent programmer who has expert level knowledge in this aging technology decides to move on, if the technology isn't well supported by a vendor, user community, and/or local talent pool, the business can be in a real bind.

There are few consequences for the business as long as they're making more money than they're spending.

The consequences come for the poor bastards that have that old crap on their resume... Bus number notwithstanding...

As we (I work for Adobe!) have talked publicly about the next rev of ColdFusion, and have shown features, talked about focus areas, etc, it is certainly not dead-end in terms of active product development.

we need a package manager (aka bundler). just passing that along :)

I agree that Adobe's ColdFusion is deadend but not Open Source Railo which is more of a Java Framework. At the end of the day there's no logical reason against CFML any more than there is against PHP, Rails, etc.

Sorry, but it is completely logical to choose Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, etc over CFML in 2013 for web projects.

>ColdFusion is... not a particularly good choice these days for a variety of reasons.

Not that I disagree with you, but I wonder if the reasons you have in mind are valid. A lot of the reasons one might assume CF sucks aren't really applicable (i.e. speed, security) any more than most other languages.

I assume all major-ish choices have decent speed, security, etc. The main things are activity, books, resources, people to hire, libraries, support, etc.

If I remember correctly, F#&@ed Company, pud's old wonder box of startup gossip was also done in ColdFusion (though in those days it was quite a good platform to do web stuff).

No, there just wasn't a less-worse one. Bloody PHP is an improvement on ColdFusion.

I disagree with you here. Although I would not choose ColdFusion for anything these days, in 1998/1999 it was a super fast way to get a web site/app together. Post 2000 it was converted to Java and became a glorified JSP tag library. It was a good platform that didn't stand the test of time.

I remember it being quite horrible around that time. But, as you say, a fast way to get a site together. I maintain that PHP was actually less worse, and I despise PHP with a contempt that would give [INSERT DICTATOR HERE] pause.