[WorldMaker]

ColdFusion also suffers technically from most of the same reasons PHP is historically legitimately unpopular as a technical choice: confusing client-side and server-side markup in the same files, making it hard to share code cleanly between modules, often "encouraging" bad software architectures simply because they are the most convenient to page layout. (Certainly there are workarounds to such technical projects in both CF and PHP (and especially PHP today).

ColdFusion does everything that PHP does poorly, with the added bonus that you are paying for it, and there's never been the excuse that ColdFusion just runs "everywhere" like PHP had during the early internet.

[bdcravens]

Both PHP and ColdFusion have frameworks (Laravel and Coldbox for example) to address this. Without Rails or Sinatra, Ruby web apps would have the same problems.

[WorldMaker]

I acknowledged there are workarounds/frameworks, and I especially recognized that modern PHP is often a different beast from classical PHP problems.

Ruby wasn't built to be embedded inside HTML, so I don't Ruby would have the worst problems of classical PHP even if Rails didn't exist, just as Perl (which both PHP and Ruby took inspirations from) even at its worst CGI architectures never quite had the same raw architecture problems that were rampant in early page-based mixed HTML and PHP design. The trade-offs for those architecture problems was development speed and "ease of use", PHP succeeded so well on the early internet almost precisely because of such problems.

ColdFusion too presumably succeeded as much as it did in Enterprise because of those problems in that space (easy to sprinkle a bit of server-side code in the middle of a page at will), though with no excuse for being free or easy to host. It's unfortunate that that also leads to the legacy of spaghetti code it will perhaps eternally have left behind in big-E Enterprise.