On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Alan Williamson (aw2.0 cloud experts) < [email protected]> wrote:
> It seldom ranks in the same area as PHP. So this is more than just one > guy. It was this one chap that, granted, spurred me to take the debate to > a wider community. > I agree, and honestly it's probably a bit of both. One guy who clearly doesn't know CFML well enough to accurately represent it on his resume, but that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't a larger problem afoot. > > I know others are finding it hard to recruit for CFML developers too - so > instead of casting the net that everyone is wrong but us, how about we look > at our own community and figure out why people are not wanting to join the > party? > This is definitely an increasingly common problem. I'm hearing the lack of ability to find people more and more these days as a reason companies are considering leaving CFML. Off the top of my head I can think of at least three major CFML shops who have changed to .NET or PHP for this reason. > > I want CFML to grow. We need CFML to grow. Recruitment is one of the key > market indicators as to the success of a language, and CFML isn't even in > the Top 50 languages! > Actually according to Tiobe CFML isn't actually a language. :-) They consider it a "framework," and that's something else I'd like to discuss at OpenCF Summit, because I've always personally felt there's a bit blurring of the lines there between language, framework, tag library ... it's a very interesting issue to discuss and might have something to do with the identity crisis. > It will be interesting for example to see how many people will be at > OpenCFSummit that are new to the language say in the last 6months. > We're putting together a survey for attendees that we'll be making live tomorrow (to gather info like t-shirt size, etc.) so I'll be sure and ask "How long have you been using CFML?" and "What other languages do you use regularly?" on there. If there are other questions folks would like to see asked (within reason of course) let me know. > > This is no longer Adobe's problem; this is _our_ problem. More power to > Adobe if they can make CFML sexy again. If we don't have more blood > coming in, then _all_ engines are doomed to fail due to a dwindling user > base. > I agree--attrition is an issue that needs to be addressed openly and honestly. Only then can we start to come up with some solutions. -- Matthew Woodward [email protected] http://blog.mattwoodward.com identi.ca / Twitter: @mpwoodward Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, etc. as attachments. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html -- tag/function ref: http://www.openbluedragon.org/manual/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en Get to Texas in Feb for OpenCFSummit http://www.opencfsummit.org/
