[ebiester]

I will admit that my CFML experience is limited to studying it for an interview (that made me not want the job) and learning it well enough to read old source code for a new application based off the old. (The app was MX 7)

My primary complaints were (as everyone) the verbosity - I've never seen a more verbose templating system, which led people to copy and paste all around. While there were some CFCs, those were mostly for tying to java backend. All this could happen in ASP, for example, but CF seemed to make it painful to do the right thing.

Of course it could happen in other languages, but my experience let me to cringe whenever CF was mentioned.

The OP used Microsoft already, so I'd look along those lines for him, even though my professional life is in java (95% javascript/HTML application with minimal templating from JSP)and my current weekend project is in rails. Razor looks like a nifty templating engine in ASP.NET MVC, for example.

[JasPanesar]

Verbosity is totally a pain.

Interestingly, I didn't know ECMAscript (aka Javascript) is too verbose for folks out there.

It turns out that CFML has two syntaxes, script and tag.

The tag based html-type that's being discussed here, and and cfscript.

Cfscript is is nearly identical to javascript and based on ECMAscript. Several languages follow ECMAscript.

In a way, if you know HTML and Javascript, any language should be easier to pick up than a language that looks completely different from HTML and Javascript, no?

Googled and found: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0...

ECMAscript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

[ebiester]

I thought that the CFML was the tag language and CFscript was considered separate, and this particular project didn't take advantage of CFscript, but looking around, people aren't too keen on the interfaces given to CFscript, even today.

http://www.clearcrystalmedia.com/pm/full-cfscript-cfcs-not-w...

http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/2/4/I-Am-Not-A-Fan-...

I can speak to a similar adobe product, Flex (and MXML/ActionScript) and at least there, Adobe tried to figure out what would make most sense in MXML, and then the ActionScript interface fell out of that, rather than what made sense for an ActionScript interface. Then, Adobe pointed everyone to the MXML as documentation, rather than having a separate documentation for ActionScript. However, things didn't work exactly the same.

Perhaps life is better in CFland, but Adobe has seemed to have "good enough? Then ship! Our devs will figure out workarounds." in their DNA. Looking at this thread -- http://forums.adobe.com/thread/507720 -- it seems ColdFusion is no exception.