We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014) | Hacker News Reader

We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014)

stackoverflow.com

36 pointsjakey_bakey6 comments

I had the dubious honor of having to debug a bespoke CRM that managed hundreds of millions of dollars in annual business written in Coldfusion... in the year of our Lord, 2017. It was a sea of hundreds of CFML files with no discernible architectural principles and a SQL schema in what I've come to term "Drunk Normal Form". There were several cheesy input bugs like the linked one that I had to fix. I was able to find an Eclipse-based breakpoint debugger that I hooked up to the test server to isolate and resolve the defects.

Enough people watched me do this with jaws agape that it was no trouble at all to convince management that we needed an immediate rewrite. For one reason or another I was only able to make it 20% of the way before other things took priority. Needless to say I don't have a soft spot for Coldfusion and find it surprising that it's still a thing even in 2024 [1].

[1] https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

“Simplifying web development. Contacted us.” Perfect. I’m somewhat impressed with the amount of effort put into acting as though CF is a viable modern stack choice.

I’ve never heard of it before. Apparently it’s EOL now?

For some reason, learning about it just now and reading of its end makes me a little sad.

I hope whoever is using it is able to successfully migrate their code to a newer tech!

> Apparently it’s EOL now?

Doesn't seem like it according to their literature. They still sell and support it.

> I hope whoever is using it is able to successfully migrate their code to a newer tech!

The writing's been on the wall for it for over a decade if we're being generous. Anybody still using it in 2024 either can't (because of a very specific business concern like codebase size or compatibility) or won't (curmudgeonly un-teachable lifers working on the product, ignorant management, etc) migrate to something better. As a pragmatic optimist I wouldn't hold my breath :-D

average stackoverflow solution: "Has the employee considered changing his name?"

A similar thing happened to me when one of my readers had the surname Dikshit.

I blogged about that experience here: https://www.learnqtp.com/is-it-a-bug-or-a-feature/

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