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Linode is a Linux company, but it's also a company founded in 2002-3. Back then, there weren't many great options for web programming and ColdFusion would have

Linode is a Linux company, but it's also a company founded in 2002-3. Back then, there weren't many great options for web programming and ColdFusion would have made a degree of sense (PHP 4.0 was released in 2000, and Ruby on Rails 1.0 didn't appear until 2004; Django was released in 2005). A modern, reasonably-secure web stack in those days really did mean "PHP with register_globals=Off". (Facebook and YouTube were both created later, and in PHP). It's a bit surprising that they haven't moved away from CF, but this is a good example of how hard it can be to transition away from legacy technologies. It's also not clear that security would have been improved by adopting, say, Rails, given that there has been no shortage in security issues there either.

hellweaver666 14y ago
Also, if it works for them, it may not be financially viable to rewrite all of their code. For example, I work for a large company that uses Perl for all the backend stuff on our website. If we were to change to a more "modern" stack, we would have to stop and focus on that for a period of time instead of pushing the company forward and improving the customer experience etc. In the meantime, Perl works for us. It's not cool or sexy but it gets the job done. Probably a similar situation at Linode.
- arc_of_descent 14y ago
  > In the meantime, Perl works for us. It's not cool or sexy > but it gets the job done. What is not cool about Perl? You don't need to transition to a new framework outside of Perl. You can upgrade your backend by investing your time in rewriting the Perl code to newer standards.
  - laumars 14y ago
    It's hard to find good Perl developers and even harder to run multi-language libraries for the same online portal (ie same site, domain, database, hosting environment: hardware, OSs....and so on).
    - rjbond3rd 14y ago
      I disagree. First, it's hard to find good developers, period. S econd, in general, good developers are hard to find by design (e.g., to avoid recruiters, but also because they are most tof the time already doing interesting work). Lastly, yes, it's hard to find good Perl programmers to do boring work, under boring conditions, at a boring wage. But then that's true of all good developers. Try to find a Rails programmer to remediate crappy code (I've tried).
      - laumars 14y ago
        You're missing my point, PHP developers that know how to build websites are available ten to the dozen. But Perl most of the Perl developers we've tried to recruit over the last 18 months are either completely clueless at writing RESTful APIs or just terrible developers (sometimes even both). We've had far more success at hiring good PHP developers and teaching them Perl then we have had at finding the Perl developers that can write web technologies. But this might just be a facet of our location (a suburb that's more than an hour away from any city), so all the developers of "niche" languages (such as Perl has sadly become) tend to get drawn to the city and higher wages. Where as those who are still good developers but not as money driven tend to pick the more popular languages because they'll pick the work in the area they want to work. (that's probably an unfair generalization statement, but it's true for the local area where I live).
        rjbond3rd 14y ago
        Very cool! Build vs. buy, you're building, everyone wins (plus you're a great employer for training your devs). What's your product or service? Now Perl programmers are now seeking -you- out :) And I'm sure you already know about the YAPC job fair: http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/job-fair.html http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/job-fair.html
        laumars 14y ago
        Thanks for the YAPC link. We're UK based though, so quite a way away from Texas. :( We do online games (amongst other things). Though I don't want to go into too many details as I try to keep a degree of anonymity online.
  - redbad 14y ago
    > What is not cool about Perl? Almost everything is not cool about Perl. Perl felt crufty and ancient even when I was learning it fifteen years ago. It's only gotten weirder, cruftier, and more ancient since then.
    - smacktoward 14y ago
      I dunno, it's been nearly as long since I learned Perl (or used it much) but the stuff I've seen out of the "modern Perl" movement (http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html) looks a lot cleaner and more, well, modern than the Perl I used to live with. You can still write "crufty and ancient" Perl, in other words, but you don't have to.
  - wuest 14y ago
    > What is not cool about Perl? Perl is my first interpreted language. It has a very special place in my heart, even if it was awkward at first to get used to it coming from a C background. Perl will always be a cool kid.
    - windexh8er 14y ago
      I think it's interesting when people tie sentiment to coding choices. As previously stated, I could never wrap my head around the horrid syntax and the feeling that if you didn't know it from the beginning it was going to be a long, hard trek in doing so. As for 'cool' I'm not so sure. Perl will be a niche sandbox for quite a while, but most run-ins with Perl (as of late) have been trying to remove it for something else. I think choosing a more accepted language has legs for a variety of reasons including code portability and long-term maintainability, both stemming from the fact that if there's only one guy maintaining all of the Perl code then that's a very-bad-thing. But, that's just me. To wax nostalgic on Perl and use that as a basis for use-case seems, at least somewhat, reckless.
      - justizin 14y ago
        Perl was Ruby before Ruby was around to be the ugly cool kid.
- mattmanser 14y ago
  I think most of the time it's never got anything to do with financial considerations, it's more just does anyone feel strongly enough about it to rewrite it in a fit of pique/on the sly/in a slow month and then on top of that have the power/influence/charm to push it through. No manager will ever say 'this non-essential system needs re-writing in a modern way'. Rewrites where you're already intimate with the code base don't take that long for non-core stuff. I assume it's the web interface that's written in CF (which you can see from viewing the source in their signup and login pages). I guess you could argue it's core to their conversion process, but I mean their core skills are servers and their maintenance rather than web development so they probably actually haven't spent that many man hours on it.
mosburger 14y ago
There was a heck of a lot of Java out there used for web development around that time. But your point still stands - Java probably would've been a lot more difficult to setup and maintain than CF.
- porker 14y ago
  Although if I remember rightly it wasn't in 2004, isn't CF now Java-powered under the surface?
  - 127001brewer 14y ago
    Yes, ColdFusion is now Java-powered: "With the release of ColdFusion MX 6.0, the engine had been re-written in Java and supported its own runtime environment, which was easily replaced through its configuration options with the runtime environment from Sun. Version 6.1 included the ability to code and debug Shockwave Flash." [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion#Other_features http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion#Other_features
- moondowner 14y ago
  I beg to differ. If it was a Java based solution maybe they would have migrated more easily. For example, Struts was released around 2000 (now we have much more choices regarding Java Web frameworks). Since then they could've migrated to Struts 2, and after that for example migrate to Spring MVC, or even stick with Struts 2.
tbatterii 14y ago
>Facebook and YouTube were both created later, and in PHP youtube was always done in python as far as I understand. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok But yeah, back in 2002-3 coldfusion was an option.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- bvdbijl 14y ago
  Youtube pre-Google was PHP
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - tbatterii 14y ago
    my primary reference that it has always been python is this video from 2007 which was only shortly after they were acquired. http://youtu.be/ZW5_eEKEC28?t=4m8s http://youtu.be/ZW5_eEKEC28?t=4m8s
  - shadowmatter 14y ago
    Youtube pre-Google was still Python, from the way several Youtubers have told it to be. Maybe an initial prototype was PHP, but not what was running when it was purchased. And trust me, there is no way Google ever would have said "rewrite it in Python." They would have said "rewrite it in Java," like every other frontend they run (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc).
- zimpenfish 14y ago
  An option much like washing your feet in boiling sulphuric acid is a way of getting sand out from between your toes. When something makes PHP look like a bastion of sanity and competence, you really should run a million miles in the other direction.
acdha 14y ago
Even back in 2002, the writing was on the wall for ColdFusion as the costs went up and many bugs[1] had gone unfixed for multiple major expensive releases during the legacy-customer milking phase of fading out of the market. Forget PHP4, even PHP 3 was a big step up in features, performance (e.g. simply issuing a database query was over an order of magnitude faster!), reliability and even security – it was easy to find advice for fixing the risky defaults and libraries for common tasks like sanitization. My guess is that this was either licensed or not considered a core feature and handed off to someone who was already invested in Cold Fusion. 1. e.g. nested loops were broken so for i: for j would repeat j[0] i times rather than correctly iterating the inner loop. The app server tended to leak memory and crash, particularly on non-Windows platforms, and the automatic restart mechanism was completely broken.
mdip 14y ago
With all of the bugs/costs associated with CF, it's strange to think of how many huge web properties made use of it (MySpace comes to mind), but the world was a very different place back then. As you mentioned, the choices were far fewer and I think the comfort level surrounding open source also played a role. In addition... 1) It was most common then to go the cgi-bin route for server side, which wasn't pleasant. CF offered an alternative to that very early on and made webdev more "accessible". 2) ColdFusion was baked into a lot of GUI based web design tools (I can only think of the name of one, NetObjects Fusion, because I rarely used those sorts of tools). Even though they probably weren't using a GUI based tool, being baked into several meant that peoples' exposure to CF was pretty common. I did absolutely nothing with ColdFusion, but routinely ran into it with freelance work I did. 3) In a large "enterprise" shops, I remember losing a bid because a manager Google(tm)'ed PHP, saw that it was originally stood for "personal home page" and told me they needed to hire someone more professional (thank God I dodged that bullet). The comfort with the current offering of open source web programming languages, in general, made managers uncomfortable for various FUD reasons. Case in point, I remember on the Windows side CF jobs getting eclipsed, nearly overnight, by RFPs for ASP in VBScript. ASP, after all, was backed by Microsoft, commercial, and effectively free (included with their Windows NT/2000 Servers).

hellweaver666 14y ago

Also, if it works for them, it may not be financially viable to rewrite all of their code. For example, I work for a large company that uses Perl for all the backend stuff on our website. If we were to change to a more "modern" stack, we would have to stop and focus on that for a period of time instead of pushing the company forward and improving the customer experience etc. In the meantime, Perl works for us. It's not cool or sexy but it gets the job done. Probably a similar situation at Linode.

arc_of_descent 14y ago
> In the meantime, Perl works for us. It's not cool or sexy > but it gets the job done. What is not cool about Perl? You don't need to transition to a new framework outside of Perl. You can upgrade your backend by investing your time in rewriting the Perl code to newer standards.
- laumars 14y ago
  It's hard to find good Perl developers and even harder to run multi-language libraries for the same online portal (ie same site, domain, database, hosting environment: hardware, OSs....and so on).
  - rjbond3rd 14y ago
    I disagree. First, it's hard to find good developers, period. S econd, in general, good developers are hard to find by design (e.g., to avoid recruiters, but also because they are most tof the time already doing interesting work). Lastly, yes, it's hard to find good Perl programmers to do boring work, under boring conditions, at a boring wage. But then that's true of all good developers. Try to find a Rails programmer to remediate crappy code (I've tried).
    - laumars 14y ago
      You're missing my point, PHP developers that know how to build websites are available ten to the dozen. But Perl most of the Perl developers we've tried to recruit over the last 18 months are either completely clueless at writing RESTful APIs or just terrible developers (sometimes even both). We've had far more success at hiring good PHP developers and teaching them Perl then we have had at finding the Perl developers that can write web technologies. But this might just be a facet of our location (a suburb that's more than an hour away from any city), so all the developers of "niche" languages (such as Perl has sadly become) tend to get drawn to the city and higher wages. Where as those who are still good developers but not as money driven tend to pick the more popular languages because they'll pick the work in the area they want to work. (that's probably an unfair generalization statement, but it's true for the local area where I live).
      - rjbond3rd 14y ago
        Very cool! Build vs. buy, you're building, everyone wins (plus you're a great employer for training your devs). What's your product or service? Now Perl programmers are now seeking -you- out :) And I'm sure you already know about the YAPC job fair: http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/job-fair.html http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/job-fair.html
        laumars 14y ago
        Thanks for the YAPC link. We're UK based though, so quite a way away from Texas. :( We do online games (amongst other things). Though I don't want to go into too many details as I try to keep a degree of anonymity online.
- redbad 14y ago
  > What is not cool about Perl? Almost everything is not cool about Perl. Perl felt crufty and ancient even when I was learning it fifteen years ago. It's only gotten weirder, cruftier, and more ancient since then.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    I dunno, it's been nearly as long since I learned Perl (or used it much) but the stuff I've seen out of the "modern Perl" movement (http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html) looks a lot cleaner and more, well, modern than the Perl I used to live with. You can still write "crufty and ancient" Perl, in other words, but you don't have to.
- wuest 14y ago
  > What is not cool about Perl? Perl is my first interpreted language. It has a very special place in my heart, even if it was awkward at first to get used to it coming from a C background. Perl will always be a cool kid.
  - windexh8er 14y ago
    I think it's interesting when people tie sentiment to coding choices. As previously stated, I could never wrap my head around the horrid syntax and the feeling that if you didn't know it from the beginning it was going to be a long, hard trek in doing so. As for 'cool' I'm not so sure. Perl will be a niche sandbox for quite a while, but most run-ins with Perl (as of late) have been trying to remove it for something else. I think choosing a more accepted language has legs for a variety of reasons including code portability and long-term maintainability, both stemming from the fact that if there's only one guy maintaining all of the Perl code then that's a very-bad-thing. But, that's just me. To wax nostalgic on Perl and use that as a basis for use-case seems, at least somewhat, reckless.
    - justizin 14y ago
      Perl was Ruby before Ruby was around to be the ugly cool kid.
mattmanser 14y ago
I think most of the time it's never got anything to do with financial considerations, it's more just does anyone feel strongly enough about it to rewrite it in a fit of pique/on the sly/in a slow month and then on top of that have the power/influence/charm to push it through. No manager will ever say 'this non-essential system needs re-writing in a modern way'. Rewrites where you're already intimate with the code base don't take that long for non-core stuff. I assume it's the web interface that's written in CF (which you can see from viewing the source in their signup and login pages). I guess you could argue it's core to their conversion process, but I mean their core skills are servers and their maintenance rather than web development so they probably actually haven't spent that many man hours on it.

mosburger 14y ago

There was a heck of a lot of Java out there used for web development around that time. But your point still stands - Java probably would've been a lot more difficult to setup and maintain than CF.

porker 14y ago
Although if I remember rightly it wasn't in 2004, isn't CF now Java-powered under the surface?
- 127001brewer 14y ago
  Yes, ColdFusion is now Java-powered: "With the release of ColdFusion MX 6.0, the engine had been re-written in Java and supported its own runtime environment, which was easily replaced through its configuration options with the runtime environment from Sun. Version 6.1 included the ability to code and debug Shockwave Flash." [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion#Other_features http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion#Other_features
moondowner 14y ago
I beg to differ. If it was a Java based solution maybe they would have migrated more easily. For example, Struts was released around 2000 (now we have much more choices regarding Java Web frameworks). Since then they could've migrated to Struts 2, and after that for example migrate to Spring MVC, or even stick with Struts 2.

tbatterii 14y ago

>Facebook and YouTube were both created later, and in PHP youtube was always done in python as far as I understand. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok But yeah, back in 2002-3 coldfusion was an option.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bvdbijl 14y ago
Youtube pre-Google was PHP
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tbatterii 14y ago
  my primary reference that it has always been python is this video from 2007 which was only shortly after they were acquired. http://youtu.be/ZW5_eEKEC28?t=4m8s http://youtu.be/ZW5_eEKEC28?t=4m8s
- shadowmatter 14y ago
  Youtube pre-Google was still Python, from the way several Youtubers have told it to be. Maybe an initial prototype was PHP, but not what was running when it was purchased. And trust me, there is no way Google ever would have said "rewrite it in Python." They would have said "rewrite it in Java," like every other frontend they run (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc).
zimpenfish 14y ago
An option much like washing your feet in boiling sulphuric acid is a way of getting sand out from between your toes. When something makes PHP look like a bastion of sanity and competence, you really should run a million miles in the other direction.

acdha 14y ago

Even back in 2002, the writing was on the wall for ColdFusion as the costs went up and many bugs[1] had gone unfixed for multiple major expensive releases during the legacy-customer milking phase of fading out of the market. Forget PHP4, even PHP 3 was a big step up in features, performance (e.g. simply issuing a database query was over an order of magnitude faster!), reliability and even security – it was easy to find advice for fixing the risky defaults and libraries for common tasks like sanitization. My guess is that this was either licensed or not considered a core feature and handed off to someone who was already invested in Cold Fusion. 1. e.g. nested loops were broken so for i: for j would repeat j[0] i times rather than correctly iterating the inner loop. The app server tended to leak memory and crash, particularly on non-Windows platforms, and the automatic restart mechanism was completely broken.

mdip 14y ago

With all of the bugs/costs associated with CF, it's strange to think of how many huge web properties made use of it (MySpace comes to mind), but the world was a very different place back then. As you mentioned, the choices were far fewer and I think the comfort level surrounding open source also played a role. In addition... 1) It was most common then to go the cgi-bin route for server side, which wasn't pleasant. CF offered an alternative to that very early on and made webdev more "accessible". 2) ColdFusion was baked into a lot of GUI based web design tools (I can only think of the name of one, NetObjects Fusion, because I rarely used those sorts of tools). Even though they probably weren't using a GUI based tool, being baked into several meant that peoples' exposure to CF was pretty common. I did absolutely nothing with ColdFusion, but routinely ran into it with freelance work I did. 3) In a large "enterprise" shops, I remember losing a bid because a manager Google(tm)'ed PHP, saw that it was originally stood for "personal home page" and told me they needed to hire someone more professional (thank God I dodged that bullet). The comfort with the current offering of open source web programming languages, in general, made managers uncomfortable for various FUD reasons. Case in point, I remember on the Windows side CF jobs getting eclipsed, nearly overnight, by RFPs for ASP in VBScript. ASP, after all, was backed by Microsoft, commercial, and effectively free (included with their Windows NT/2000 Servers).