I have been fighting it. The FUD, the slim job market, the abuse. But I have given in again to the lure of CF.

I have played with and or made production apps with PHP, ASP, C#/ASP.NET, Java/JSP/Groovy, Ruby, ROR, PERL and so on.

And the one thing I have noticed is that for a lot of the above languages writing a simple app (say in Java/JSP) is like swatting a bug with a sledge hammer.

With ROR, you have to know a bazzion hand shakes to do something that is SUPER SIMPLE. Like trying to group output by category:

http://instantbadger.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-still-miss-cfoutput.html

Or with PHP where everything is odles of noodles spaghetti.

HTML is spaghetti, SQL is spaghetti, dynamic JS is spaghetti.... You will go blind trying to debug dynamic JS generated by PHP.

ASP? As Sid said in '78: No future for you!

ASPX/C#? Code behind? Poor excuse for OO. It never made sense to me. ASP.NET is smart and well designed but the whole Code behind thing gave me a rash.

I do like the VB and C# syntax. Especially C#

BTW JS browser issues irritates me to no end. i.e. "GODDAMMIT just FARKING WORK!!!!"

But CF? It is so simple, so smart, so damn easy. The easy stuff is idiot proof, the harder stuff is a cake walk compared to other languages. And the hard stuff? Do you even have to ask?

You need to do something? Chances are there is an out of the box tag or function for it. Need to do some heavy lifting? You have COM, the entire Java and .NET library at your command. Not to mention most any Java class including most everything at Apache.org and Source forge. Or you can roll your own.

What else you need? AJAX? Done. Frameworks? Done. ORM? Done. Code Generators? Done. Scaffolding? Done. Unit Tests? Done.

Ever update a database record with one line of code using three variables?

I didn't think so.