4 ms·

I've joked for awhile that I might be literally the only person on earth who has had paying work in Coldfusion, Foxpro, ActionScript, Erlang, Haskell, and F#. I

I've joked for awhile that I might be literally the only person on earth who has had paying work in Coldfusion, Foxpro, ActionScript, Erlang, Haskell, and F#. I don't that for sure, I haven't taken a global survey, it just seems like a pretty obscure pairing. When you drop out of college, you take whatever job you can get. My first software job was doing ColdFusion, ActionScript, and Foxpro for a Tae Kwon Do studio. I didn't really know Coldfusion or Foxpro, but I picked them up relatively quick, and while I never really liked either of them, I did appreciate how quick I was able to prototype stuff in Coldfusion. It was relatively easy to go from 0-to-website with CFML and get something that more or less worked, and even had a few niceties as well; the SQL support was actually quite good (including built-in caching), you could fairly easily call out to Java libraries, and it was easy enough to remote with Flash/Flex, which was still relatively useful. I found it almost impossible to actually maintain anything, and I don't think I'd use it for anything now (particularly since I dont' do any frontend anymore), but there's a sentimentality that I will forever have for Coldfusion, if for no other reason it's the thing that kicked off my career.

hackthemack 2y ago
I had to work on quite a few coldfusion sites in the 1998 to 2010 timeframe. I found having to write brackets for each and every statement to be tiring; <cfif> <cfelse> <cfset var mystuff "johnnyb"> Eventually, they incorporated cfscript which let you write stuff that was more like the c derived languages. But they did not port every <cftag> function over to cfscript. Terrible oversight. If you had to resort to ending your cfscript to fall back to a cftag it made the code really ugly. <cfdump> was ahead of its time. It came out way before php var_dump. <cfquery> was really powerful. It let you take any database result and then treat that result as though it were a database itself. So you could query a query so to speak. Something else I remember is how many ColdFusion devotees I worked with. I never understand how people get so attached to a language (ColdFusion, Ruby), a company (Apple), or a database (Postgres, MongoDB). It becomes some kind of cult. So many defensive ColdFusion programmers I had to deal with. Edit to add another memory. Old ColdFusion would use YES for true and NO for false. That would cause a lot of headaches when dealing with other systems that had no notion of YES or NO.
- tombert 2y ago
  > ventually, they incorporated cfscript which let you write stuff that was more like the c derived languages. But they did not port every <cftag> function over to cfscript. Terrible oversight. If you had to resort to ending your cfscript to fall back to a cftag it made the code really ugly. I never used cfscript for this reason. I felt like if I couldn't use every feature of the language, then there's no point in messing with it. I definitely miss cfdump sometimes. It was ridiculously useful for what it did. > Something else I remember is how many ColdFusion devotees I worked with. I never understand how people get so attached to a language (ColdFusion, Ruby), a company (Apple), or a database (Postgres, MongoDB). It becomes some kind of cult. So many defensive ColdFusion programmers I had to deal with. Yeah, even when I doing that job (2012), Coldfusion was falling out of favor, and I would mention to my manager that we might want to start transitioning to Railo or rewriting stuff using Java EE or something, and would get extremely defensive about it. He was more polite than this, but he basically said something that implied that I didn't know what I was talking about and Coldfusion will still be used for years and years to come. I guess he was half right :)
troupo 2y ago
ASP Classic, Coldfusion, PHP, Erlang, Java, C#, Javascript here :) CFML was weird, but true, it worked. I felt it was like PHP for JVM: type stuff run site, everything works
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tomcam 2y ago
> I've joked for awhile that I might be literally the only person on earth who has had paying work in Coldfusion, Foxpro, ActionScript, Erlang, Haskell, and F# What, no Clipper?
- Terretta 2y ago
  They are too busy transitioning from Chapel to DBOS.
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Deep cut

hackthemack 2y ago

I had to work on quite a few coldfusion sites in the 1998 to 2010 timeframe. I found having to write brackets for each and every statement to be tiring; <cfif> <cfelse> <cfset var mystuff "johnnyb"> Eventually, they incorporated cfscript which let you write stuff that was more like the c derived languages. But they did not port every <cftag> function over to cfscript. Terrible oversight. If you had to resort to ending your cfscript to fall back to a cftag it made the code really ugly. <cfdump> was ahead of its time. It came out way before php var_dump. <cfquery> was really powerful. It let you take any database result and then treat that result as though it were a database itself. So you could query a query so to speak. Something else I remember is how many ColdFusion devotees I worked with. I never understand how people get so attached to a language (ColdFusion, Ruby), a company (Apple), or a database (Postgres, MongoDB). It becomes some kind of cult. So many defensive ColdFusion programmers I had to deal with. Edit to add another memory. Old ColdFusion would use YES for true and NO for false. That would cause a lot of headaches when dealing with other systems that had no notion of YES or NO.

tombert 2y ago
> ventually, they incorporated cfscript which let you write stuff that was more like the c derived languages. But they did not port every <cftag> function over to cfscript. Terrible oversight. If you had to resort to ending your cfscript to fall back to a cftag it made the code really ugly. I never used cfscript for this reason. I felt like if I couldn't use every feature of the language, then there's no point in messing with it. I definitely miss cfdump sometimes. It was ridiculously useful for what it did. > Something else I remember is how many ColdFusion devotees I worked with. I never understand how people get so attached to a language (ColdFusion, Ruby), a company (Apple), or a database (Postgres, MongoDB). It becomes some kind of cult. So many defensive ColdFusion programmers I had to deal with. Yeah, even when I doing that job (2012), Coldfusion was falling out of favor, and I would mention to my manager that we might want to start transitioning to Railo or rewriting stuff using Java EE or something, and would get extremely defensive about it. He was more polite than this, but he basically said something that implied that I didn't know what I was talking about and Coldfusion will still be used for years and years to come. I guess he was half right :)

troupo 2y ago

ASP Classic, Coldfusion, PHP, Erlang, Java, C#, Javascript here :) CFML was weird, but true, it worked. I felt it was like PHP for JVM: type stuff run site, everything works

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tomcam 2y ago

> I've joked for awhile that I might be literally the only person on earth who has had paying work in Coldfusion, Foxpro, ActionScript, Erlang, Haskell, and F# What, no Clipper?

Terretta 2y ago
They are too busy transitioning from Chapel to DBOS.
- tomcam 2y ago
  Deep cut