6 ms·

I find it so funny how people use to make fun of ColdFusion cause of it's tag syntax and the ability to create your own custom tags. Seems we have come full cir

I find it so funny how people use to make fun of ColdFusion cause of it's tag syntax and the ability to create your own custom tags. Seems we have come full circle now on the frontend. ColdFusion was truly ahead of it's time.

cheschire 7y ago
I'm not sure that paradigm ever ceased. ASP.NET webforms XAML had custom namespaced tags, now ASP.NET Core has custom tag helpers.
sergiotapia 7y ago
WPF was react before react was an blob idea in someone's brain. Damn I wonder how 40+ year old engineers feel about tech. "We've seen this shit when your dad was in his teens!"
- pjmlp 7y ago
  We largely ignore it, until it actually becomes a project requirement, and then we learn hands-on. If we are lucky, most of them die in a space of 5 years, and then you get to enjoy project contracts to port all those shiny apps to boring sound, long lasting technology stacks.
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    my man
  - snaky 7y ago
    Contracts to port all those truly ancient proprietary stuff to truly ancient non-proprietary stacks are fine too. http://www.tpfug.org/pdf/2019/2019-TPF_Modernization.pdf http://www.tpfug.org/pdf/2019/2019-TPF_Modernization.pdf
jchw 7y ago
I think this is missing the forest for the trees. The key innovation behind most modern frameworks is DOM abstraction and reactive data flow. The main reason JS apps were, at one point, ugly spaghetti directly manipulating DOM structures using jQuery is because JS was dog-slow at a point and was not really capable of doing the cool object oriented stuff you could do on desktop apps. jQuery answered to the problems of the time: it was relatively fast, provided a terse interface (vs DOM,) and probably most importantly, it smoothed over browser bugs and inconsistencies. Angular.js finally popularized components, in the post IE6 era when JavaScript execution was a lot less slow and unreliable, then React popularized reactive data flow and virtual DOM. I think most good ideas in software engineering have already been discovered, and primary innovation has long been applying existing ideas more effectively. Hard to argue Angular.js or React does anything that has genuinely never been done before, and same to ColdFusion.
- Udik 7y ago
  > JS was dog-slow at a point and was not really capable of doing the cool object oriented stuff you could do on desktop apps. Absolutely wrong, Javascript was always fast enough to make web applications that had the responsiveness of desktop apps. The problem is that nobody was writing desktop apps in the browser; they were writing server-generated web pages that offered the users some extra interactivity via js. So they had to look for elements in a static template, and hook into them or perform transformations on the fly, instead of generating everything programmatically as it's done now.
  - jchw 7y ago
    You dismissed my claim without any numbers, so too shall I. Of course it was slow, extremely so. Pointedly, Objects were Especially slow, and even a performance cliff in V8 in many circumstances. Take a look at a React flamegraph, it’s incredible how deep and wide the callstacks are, for things that can easily run 60 times a second. You couldn’t do that years ago. IE6 and 7 were so slow in both JavaScript execution and DOM that it’s silly anyone would ever claim JS execution was “fast enough.” The art of fast JavaScript was once arcane, but its clear we’re so far into fast JS execution that nobody even remembers how awful it was. Especially when you had to support IE. Oh, and let’s not forget the incredible increases in CPU speed. Even a later Core 2 Duo machine I have is awful for browsing the web, basically unusable without uBlock Origin.
ataturk 7y ago
ColdFusion was great for one-off websites. It was not so great for code reuse. Before most places used source control, I worked with a guy at a major university who would knock out websites using CF and they loved him, but the problem was the code was unmaintainable and copy & pasted across all the sites such that whenever he had to fix a bug in his code, he would have to update 20 websites and make the change 20x. It was a disaster.
_jal 7y ago
The problem with CF was not making up tags. The problem with CF was that the library was a freakish spaghetti mess, the language made no sense, didn't interop with anything open source, and kept being repositioned for different uses as it failed so it had no coherent niche. It was pretty much a proprietary PHP before PHP was somewhat rehabilitated, except it somehow made less sense.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I agree. The tags argument is usually by those who never or barely wrote CF. Those who did (long-time CF dev here) have more than our fair share of gripes with the language (If a CF dev doesn't have issues with the language, it's because they've never learned anything else and are desperately trying to defend the fort)
bdcravens 7y ago
CF has some neat features, like its in-memory SQL engine. However, the the list of features the language never adopted that everything else supports (first-class environment variable support, package management, modularity, etc) are far greater than its innovative features. Most modern front-end frameworks aren't just custom tag languages; their strength is in component lifecycles. ColdFusion never really had good support for events at the custom tag level.

cheschire 7y ago

I'm not sure that paradigm ever ceased. ASP.NET webforms XAML had custom namespaced tags, now ASP.NET Core has custom tag helpers.

sergiotapia 7y ago

WPF was react before react was an blob idea in someone's brain. Damn I wonder how 40+ year old engineers feel about tech. "We've seen this shit when your dad was in his teens!"

pjmlp 7y ago
We largely ignore it, until it actually becomes a project requirement, and then we learn hands-on. If we are lucky, most of them die in a space of 5 years, and then you get to enjoy project contracts to port all those shiny apps to boring sound, long lasting technology stacks.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  my man
- snaky 7y ago
  Contracts to port all those truly ancient proprietary stuff to truly ancient non-proprietary stacks are fine too. http://www.tpfug.org/pdf/2019/2019-TPF_Modernization.pdf http://www.tpfug.org/pdf/2019/2019-TPF_Modernization.pdf

jchw 7y ago

I think this is missing the forest for the trees. The key innovation behind most modern frameworks is DOM abstraction and reactive data flow. The main reason JS apps were, at one point, ugly spaghetti directly manipulating DOM structures using jQuery is because JS was dog-slow at a point and was not really capable of doing the cool object oriented stuff you could do on desktop apps. jQuery answered to the problems of the time: it was relatively fast, provided a terse interface (vs DOM,) and probably most importantly, it smoothed over browser bugs and inconsistencies. Angular.js finally popularized components, in the post IE6 era when JavaScript execution was a lot less slow and unreliable, then React popularized reactive data flow and virtual DOM. I think most good ideas in software engineering have already been discovered, and primary innovation has long been applying existing ideas more effectively. Hard to argue Angular.js or React does anything that has genuinely never been done before, and same to ColdFusion.

Udik 7y ago
> JS was dog-slow at a point and was not really capable of doing the cool object oriented stuff you could do on desktop apps. Absolutely wrong, Javascript was always fast enough to make web applications that had the responsiveness of desktop apps. The problem is that nobody was writing desktop apps in the browser; they were writing server-generated web pages that offered the users some extra interactivity via js. So they had to look for elements in a static template, and hook into them or perform transformations on the fly, instead of generating everything programmatically as it's done now.
- jchw 7y ago
  You dismissed my claim without any numbers, so too shall I. Of course it was slow, extremely so. Pointedly, Objects were Especially slow, and even a performance cliff in V8 in many circumstances. Take a look at a React flamegraph, it’s incredible how deep and wide the callstacks are, for things that can easily run 60 times a second. You couldn’t do that years ago. IE6 and 7 were so slow in both JavaScript execution and DOM that it’s silly anyone would ever claim JS execution was “fast enough.” The art of fast JavaScript was once arcane, but its clear we’re so far into fast JS execution that nobody even remembers how awful it was. Especially when you had to support IE. Oh, and let’s not forget the incredible increases in CPU speed. Even a later Core 2 Duo machine I have is awful for browsing the web, basically unusable without uBlock Origin.

ataturk 7y ago

ColdFusion was great for one-off websites. It was not so great for code reuse. Before most places used source control, I worked with a guy at a major university who would knock out websites using CF and they loved him, but the problem was the code was unmaintainable and copy & pasted across all the sites such that whenever he had to fix a bug in his code, he would have to update 20 websites and make the change 20x. It was a disaster.

_jal 7y ago

The problem with CF was not making up tags. The problem with CF was that the library was a freakish spaghetti mess, the language made no sense, didn't interop with anything open source, and kept being repositioned for different uses as it failed so it had no coherent niche. It was pretty much a proprietary PHP before PHP was somewhat rehabilitated, except it somehow made less sense.

bdcravens 7y ago
I agree. The tags argument is usually by those who never or barely wrote CF. Those who did (long-time CF dev here) have more than our fair share of gripes with the language (If a CF dev doesn't have issues with the language, it's because they've never learned anything else and are desperately trying to defend the fort)

bdcravens 7y ago

CF has some neat features, like its in-memory SQL engine. However, the the list of features the language never adopted that everything else supports (first-class environment variable support, package management, modularity, etc) are far greater than its innovative features. Most modern front-end frameworks aren't just custom tag languages; their strength is in component lifecycles. ColdFusion never really had good support for events at the custom tag level.