Perhaps I've got a negative attitude about the intelligence of developers because I've been a maintenance programmer for too long. I've seen so many apps that almost work in ColdFusion because some guy didn't know if he was using a session scope or an application scope or request variable in CF.
I worked at a place where there was a ColdFusionMafia that existed just to bamboozle management into shelling out $8000 for server licenses. They'd go blah blah blah about how Cold Fusion was a great force multiplier but most of them couldn't code their way out of a paper bag they just knew a bunch of tricks that almost worked but couldn't be bothered to get HTML and SQL escaping right.
To be fair you can write pretty decent code in CF if you know how to code but if you knew how to code why would you be coding in CF?
The ColdFusionMafia ultimately got the organization to spend upwards of $500k worth of software licenses and people's time to implement a commercial CMS product that was ultimately abandoned. They pulled me off a project that was really worthwhile and it ended up in a project failure that caused my whole group and everybody above it all the way to the top of the organization to get fired.
Some recruiter called me the other day wanting to know if I want to code ColdFusion in Ohio and I'm like I'd rather be shuffling punched cards....
CF is easy to get started in, so is PHP. I've seen some horrible spaghetti code in both languages. That doesn't make either of them bad.
I like CF because I like writing fewer lines of code to get things done. That doesn't stop me from looking at other languages seeing if something is better.
In fact some members of the community are blogging the seven languages in seven days book, not all of us have blinders on;<).
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2106-Seven-Languages-In-Seven-W...
You (and others) should give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised by its simplicity.
