is coldfusion still a thing in 2017?
It has always been an approachable language to people that don't program full time. It looks and feels like HTML, so novice programmers were productive fairly quickly in CF. Career programmers tend to not like it since it is verbose and restrictive, but I have know numerous people use CF as a jumping point for programming and IT careers solving company problems with a bit of code.
Since hard to test and, hence, untestable codebases are the hardest to migrate, I'd assume web applications that depend too much on Cold Fusion (or PHP, ASP or Model 1 JSP) will remain in those technologies until the whole thing is rewritten from scratch.
I use CF daily as my primary programming language, and I can assure you it's still a great option in terms of productivity and scalability in 2017.
CFML has open source engines like Lucee Server, and a modern arsenal of tooling including CLI, REPL, package management, MVC, IDE plugins, conferences around the world, and active support forums like our Slack team with 2.2K people in it. CF's modern scripting syntax reads like JavaScript and includes function programming, closures, and classical OO constructs. It sounds like you need to check it out again. Everything I listed above has been around for years in the CF space.
http://ir.tesla.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1042449
(third-party site, but interesting nonetheless)