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Comment by eljimmy | Hacker News Reader

I don't really care much for language popularity, but I think the case to be made, as can be for any language of waning popularity, is the pool of developers who are available for hire.

ColdFusion is also unpopular for an important fact: it's proprietary and their licenses aren't cheap.

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ColdFusion also suffers technically from most of the same reasons PHP is historically legitimately unpopular as a technical choice: confusing client-side and server-side markup in the same files, making it hard to share code cleanly between modules, often "encouraging" bad software architectures simply because they are the most convenient to page layout. (Certainly there are workarounds to such technical projects in both CF and PHP (and especially PHP today).

ColdFusion does everything that PHP does poorly, with the added bonus that you are paying for it, and there's never been the excuse that ColdFusion just runs "everywhere" like PHP had during the early internet.

Both PHP and ColdFusion have frameworks (Laravel and Coldbox for example) to address this. Without Rails or Sinatra, Ruby web apps would have the same problems.

I acknowledged there are workarounds/frameworks, and I especially recognized that modern PHP is often a different beast from classical PHP problems.

Ruby wasn't built to be embedded inside HTML, so I don't Ruby would have the worst problems of classical PHP even if Rails didn't exist, just as Perl (which both PHP and Ruby took inspirations from) even at its worst CGI architectures never quite had the same raw architecture problems that were rampant in early page-based mixed HTML and PHP design. The trade-offs for those architecture problems was development speed and "ease of use", PHP succeeded so well on the early internet almost precisely because of such problems.

ColdFusion too presumably succeeded as much as it did in Enterprise because of those problems in that space (easy to sprinkle a bit of server-side code in the middle of a page at will), though with no excuse for being free or easy to host. It's unfortunate that that also leads to the legacy of spaghetti code it will perhaps eternally have left behind in big-E Enterprise.

The proprietary nature of it has really stunted it in the long term. Students aren't learning it in school because there's plenty of free (in all senses of the word) alternatives available, such as Python or NodeJS.

I think the overall marketplace has shown pretty clearly that proprietary languages are doomed to insignificant market share at best, outright failure at worst. The writing was really on the wall when Microsoft opened up all of .NET.

CFML has had open source implementations for over 10 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion_Markup_Language#H...

Too late. It was already dying a decade ago. Two decades ago might have made a difference.

Wasn't speaking to that - only whether or not there are open source options. Being open source in and off itself seems to be a prerequisite, but it's more a matter of building a strong ecosystem (for example, imagine Ruby without Rails or node without npm), which never really materialized for CFML.

Got to love how much misinformation is being spread here. The ColdFusion language has multiple engines that it can run on. At least 2 of them are open source.

The most popular one I know is https://lucee.org/

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