I Thought ColdFusion was Dead?

Every time a ColdFusion topic hits Digg , there are without fail more comments on the ColdFusion topic than those around it. The uneducated masses start off by attacking the post by throwing their 2 hours of experience they gained by looking at an application another beginner programmer wrote as a first test of the language. Ok, so some people have more experience than that; but with how bad the comments are I wouldn’t want to overestimate them. So what do you say to the many reactions criticizing ColdFusion? I can’t help but run to the defense, although it’s a lost cause on most the cases, since it’s just flamebait. But some people are genuinely uninformed smart people. These are the responses that deserve a response, but what do you say? There are a host of features that do no good to mention, and if someone wanted a technology for rapid development that are many that make it much easier than ColdFusion. ColdFusion makes _ enterprise_ development fastest. That’s it’s niche, and the recent pricing points to that. That always make me think though, what are the top sites out there actually using ColdFusion? GotCFM.com was off to a great start but started to die down recently. The number of sites listed shot up to 800 in a matter of days, then topped off from there. I have a feeling it’s due to the huge amount of spam that probably comes through that Rey has to deal with. I think it would be amazing for a service such as Reys to use that data to analyze the sites a little more. Imagine having those sites sorted by Alexa rating, or PageRank or even Technorati rating? Being able to say “look at these top sites that use ColdFusion in the Alexa top 500!”. I ran into a list of the Top 100 Rails sites by Alexa Rating as well as a very cool article on Ranking Ruby/Rails Blogs with scRUBYt! Using Alexa and Technorati . All things that sound like fun to do in ColdFusion if someone hasn’t tried already. Ideally this would be using the data already on gotcfm, to which I’m sure Rey could get some help (I sent an email offering, we’ll see :). Curiosity still got the better of me. Damon Coopers internal memo mentioned some big users of ColdFusion, which got me wondering more which sites use CF? Makes me want to start remixing the data and see; but that’ll have to wait until next week after the Adogo presentation I still need to prepare for.