Interview with J.J. Allaire | Hacker News Reader

Interview with J.J. Allaire

rstudio.com

I did a lot of Cold Fusion back when it was owned by Allaire, and drifted away when it became what I felt was a DSL for bad Java. Even had a component I sold (for RSS parsing into CF Objects).

It was the language of my first big assignment after striking out on my own years ago, and I'll always have fond memories of JJ and Jeremy and of CFML. Homesite / Cold Fusion Studio were the best HTML authoring tools in their time, too.

I'm glad to hear that he's still creating in this industry! I have been hearing so many things about R and keep meaning to look further into it.

I started developing seriously in '99 and ColdFusion was how I got my start. Many fond memories as well.

The Open Source version of CF (http://lucee.org/) is better than the Adobe-owned version at this point (IMHO).

I started with CF back in 1996 as well. So cool to see JJ still working on this stuff!

Cheers. It was interesting to learn what JJA has been up to since coming up with the great (at the time) Cold Fusion back in the mid 90s. [I'm really showing my age here. ;)]

Yes. ColdFusion was groundbreaking back in 1996 and I have fond memories of coding "HTML-by-hand" in Homesite. I even worked at an organization that used JRun application server for quite a few years after the Macromedia/Adobe purchase.

Yes, and CF lived for ages and ages too. It was really quite brilliant. I hung on to ColdFusion (as it later came to be known) for far too long which has probably hurt my career as I ought to have been gaining experience in other languages. Having said that, picking up PHP from ColdFusion was dead easy ... but have now made the switch to C# / .netCore in the last year and finding that to be a whole new world. SOLID, DDD, TDD, etc. It's never too late. :-)

Looking at CFML specifically [1], it's surprisingly similar to the components and directives seen in modern JS frameworks like Angular, React and Vue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion_Markup_Language

Yes, it was like a more polished and concise PHP. Plus with a cooler name. :) Comparison for the curious below although it's been too long for me to tell how accurate it is other than the ColdFusion was pretty concise for database stuff:

http://paulalkema.com/post.cfm/php-vs-coldfusion

It could be considered in a way like a 4GL for apps that combined web and database. So, really good at what it's specifically designed for then starting to become painful when use case isn't true for that.

Wow, this is like Allaire (the late 90s company) all over again! Pick a cool technology that techies love and just grind out some great tools. It is really heartening to know that you can still build a real company around this, not just a volunteer open source project. Kudos to JJ.

Context: In the late 90s the cool technology was the web and ColdFusion was one of the first popular server-side markup languages (along with ASP and PHP). This time around it looks like the cool tech is big data analysis.

I love how he is still coding the major part of the day. That is an inspiration - that you can stick to what you love even though you are starting companies left, right and center throughout your years.

The bulk of my career was spent in ColdFusion, starting around 1999. In recent years, I've moved away from it, but even today, there's features in there I really miss, like the simplicity and power of custom tags, and the embedded SQL engine that you could use against any recordset.

I was VERY confused at the beginning.

This is not about R-Studio, the software/data recovery utility, but about R-Studio, the R (language) IDE.

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