I ended up doing cf almost by accident for quite a while (like, 8 years) and was there as it went through the adobe -> railo transition.

Coldfusion had a bad rep but it was actually a pretty good tool to work with. Railo made it a million times better in every way - the performance was solid and the environment was full featured enough to let you focus on the code.

The original adobe (macromedia, right?) version was a mess. There were no functions but you could import modules. Massive caveat that those modules were allowed to mutate state outside of themselves so people would import them to, for example, run some db queries and set some variables in the calling code with the results. You can imagine the absolute unmaintainable mess that ensued.