>I’ve been meaning to respond to this for a while. I sense a strong
>condescending disdain for CF in your “tone” also apparent in your
>recent implication that CF is a “pet” language.
>

It’s so unfortunate that by voicing an unpopular opinion I appear to
continually piss off so many people on this, but I’m going to try my
best to make some sense of it.

CF is not a “pet language”. Any technology, no matter how powerful, can
become a*pet* to any developer who becomes so emotionally attached to
it’s existence that they attempt to continually justify and evangelize
it regardless of set or setting, regardless of appropriateness or fact!.

People get attached to inanimate things, especially in the computer
world. Languages, hardware, vendors, OS’, I don’t get it. To me, it’s
completely silly, it’s boring, and it’s part of this ridiculous
“tool-tunnel-vision” culture that exists in the developer world.

I don’t care what programming language a person likes. As far as I’m
concerned, they are all (mostly ) the same and it’s all good. What I do
care about is so-called “software journalism” that attempts to take a
group of products and spins them in a manner that puts the author’s
particular favorite on top as being “more capable”, when the only actual
value that can actually be quantified is purely subjective. This is my
gripe, this is my complaint about the Sitepoint article and the Ben
Forta stuff. Re-read these articles and tell me that they are really
anything other than marketing literature and fluff. When I see it, I’m
gonna call it out. That’s how I am.

That’s as far as it goes for me. You like CFMX, that’s cool. I don’t.
You will not convice me that it is *better* than anything else out
there. I know what CFMX can do. There is no feature set that in CFMX
that is not comparable to a feature set in Language X. There is
*nothing* it can do that 10 other things can’t. It may do it
differently, maybe in less LOC, but I’m sorry, a web app is a web app is
a web app. You can rant and rave all you wish. Spin it into a
compliment if it makes you feel better – CFMX is as capable as any web
app dev platform out there!

Note I have not once taken any personal stance on a particular
technology or programming language throughout this discussion. I
haven’t advocated anything. Macromedia and Microsoft and Zend and Larry
Wall and Sun don’t pay me to preach their product. I get paid to be a
web developer. I choose a tool of my preference when I have the chance.
Sometimes, I use whatever is handed to me.

Most people don’t take it personally . I don’t take it personally when
the C programmers bag on PHP/C#/Java for being a toy language. Hell,
those guys bag on EVERY language. They make faces at me, make noises
like someone farted in the cube. But no one really cares! We’re all
there to program and get paid for it. First day of class, I told my
teacher I was doing some C# stuff, he told me to “learn a man’s
language”. That’s funny shit!

What is it about Macromedia & Apple products that create this intense
emotional attachment? Is it the fact that for many, it’s their “first love”?

Taking an objective view of the *products* I choose to build my
livelihood around is something I take very seriously, but never to the
point where I cannot make an objective decision about technical merit.