On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Sean Corfield <[email protected]> wrote:
> Remember: the success of PHP, Ruby and other languages has come about > _without_ a company spending money on marketing. Those languages have > become popular because their users - their communities - have > evangelized and created tutorials and books and great free open source > software and so on. You can't lay the fault at Adobe's door... Sure, but PHP, Ruby and other languages don't have an up front cost associated with them. So yeah, nobody had to market those languages, but at the same time, those languages didn't have to overcome the objections of "why should I pay $x per server up front and then the costs of upgrades..." I think the CF community has done OK in creating tutorials and the like. Books, maybe not so much since version 6, but I think that's more due to publishers not being so interested in publishing ColdFusion books. Great free open source software? Yeah, we may be lacking in that area compared to other languages... but I think that price tag issue still comes into play there. You can set up a PHP server and grab wordpress and be up and running. If you want ColdFusion OSS, you still need to buy the ColdFusion license... so I don't know that the demand has been there enough to justify the effort. Don't get me wrong... you and I have had this conversation at CFUG meetings. There just doesn't seem to be as much enthusiasm in general within the CF community as there is in some other, younger communities. We've talked about some of the reasons why that might be (mature language, many users content to get by using what they know...), and that's unfortunate. But CF is, and likely always will be, a niche product. We'll never have the sheer numbers that PHP or Ruby do. So as enthusiastic as our army may ever be... we'll never have the numbers to go out and really make a significant impact on the programming community as a whole. We're just not big enough (and yeah, i know, that's what she said). So yes... I think there's some responsibility in the community to evangelize and help spread the word. But I do think we are perfectly justified in laying a good amount of the responsibility at Adobe's door. It's their product. They charge for it (the product, the support). I think they share a huge chunk of the responsibility in helping to spread the word, and I'd personally love to see them make more of an effort in that area. If Microsoft could show up as a sponsor at a CF conference, why doesn't Adobe show up at MS events? Or other non Adobe-specific events? Where's the advertising in the media targeting other developers? I see lots of it for Flex and AIR and "hey let's all go be Android developers and f*ck Apple". Don't see nearly that much time/energy/effort in saying, "hey let's all go be CF developers and f*ck Ruby or .NET or whomever else". Just my $0.02 :) -- Charlie Griefer http://charlie.griefer.com/ I have failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my life. I love my wife. And I wish you my kind of success. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:340805 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
