Interesting PHP Article

[Matthew Woodward]

Kind of old, but found it relevant to the recent discussions we've been having:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/ewww-you-use-php/

Also interesting because of the mention of CFML/Railo, and the subsequent "lmao" comment. :-)

But, this whole "ewww" thing is something I find is a typical reaction from people. Just last week at the Grails Meetup here in Seattle we had a new member in the group and I told him I did CFML, and I got the "ewww" look followed by "I had no idea that was still around."

I thought this post about PHP did a pretty good job of saying "hey, we're doing very cool stuff here, so don't let the language get in the way," which is an approach we CFML developers can take on both open source projects as well as when trying to hire CFML developers, which seems to be an increasingly challenging task.

--
Matthew Woodward
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[Steven Neiland]

Great find Matt.

I'm wondering if anyone in the cfml community is willing to do a similar piece on why cfml is so great and debunk some of the language haters.

Any takers?

[Matthew Woodward]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Steven Neiland <steven....@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm wondering if anyone in the cfml community is willing to do a similar piece on why cfml is so great and debunk some of the language haters.

Oddly enough ...

http://blog.pud.com/post/9582597828/why-must-you-laugh-at-my-back-end

And even more coincidentally (WEIRD how this stuff happens sometimes), MailChimp just acquired one of Pud's projects:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/

Anyway, I think Pud's blog post could serve as some inspiration because A) he's a well-known guy in Internet land and B) I think he does a nice job of saying "CFML is great and I can get stuff done with it. 'Nuff said."

As I said on Google+ the other day the reason I don't engage in the holy wars that crop up from time to time is that at the end of the day there's no *logical* reason against CFML any more than there is against PHP, Rails, etc. etc. etc. The only argument anyone even sets forth anymore is stuff like "that's still around?" or "CFML sux!" Hence my hesitance to engage people when that's where the conversation starts.

I'll try to chew on this and maybe we could even come up with a community manifesto of sorts. Open letter to the haters, that sort of thing. I think Terry Ryan started on something at some point but I think we can certainly use more of this sort of stuff on the tubes.

[Steven Neiland]

I totally understand the reluctance to engage with haters as they have nearly always formed opinions based nothing or out of date information, however I do think though that at some level we have to. Remember some of these folks have influence with management and its better to have a strong positive counter argument that a manager can be pointed to.

I would hope that maybe we could get the community to come together on a strong open letter to the cfml haters. I know we have the writing talent and knowledge. If we could then get everyone to post/link to it from their blogs (and maybe other forums) we could generate some more positive PR for cfml.

I know people will be reluctant on some levels because this invites the haters to come out of the woodwork ... but I think we can handle the heat :-)  My end vision would be that we could maybe get cfml trending as a "hot" technology.