ColdFusion Developers are Suckers
Posted by Steve Brownlee on June 10, 2009Jun 10
You know why? Because you guys and gals feed the trolls.
Every so often, someone comes along and says “ColdFusion is outdated and dying,” or “Don’t waste your time learning such an antiquated and proprietary language, no one uses it anyways.” Of course, anyone with a brain knows that these people are 1 of 2 things…
- Selling themselves, because if they were in the business of sharing knowledge, they wouldn’t purport such an ignorant viewpoint of application technology.
- Trying to drive traffic to their site. If there’s one way to bump up your traffic, it’s to draw the ire of the ColdFusion development community.
Next time this happens, just let a few people evenly comment on how misinformed or self-serving the article is and leave it at that. No need to leave 400 comments, have 50 articles on other blogs published attacking the person, and have a Twitter storm for a week, because all that does is serve his/her interests.
I know this is hard to do, especially when someone puts your livelihood in a negative light, but often the best thing to do is let the article evolve into the trashbin of obscurity, where it belongs.
you have a point to some extent — what I find is happening is more the CF community going in defense as soon as something negative appears.
Rather than taking on the challenge and proving them wrong it ends up getting personal. There is IMHO a danger of the CF community closing in on itself, or at least the perception that it is a very closed ecosystem — even for Flash/Flex developers like myself.
I think the open source CFML initiatives are starting to break through this and taking up the challenge to sell CFML to the masses. This in fact is should what be happening rather than – excuse me for referencing this post – complaining about people who question the continued relevancy of a technology and calling them trolls for doing so.
I’ve recently taken up the challenge to rediscover CF and its been an interesting journey.
Good points, Peter. Just to be clear, while I do take a not-so-subtle stab at the “trolls”, the point of this article is not to complain about them, but to try to prevent what you succinctly call a “closed ecosystem”.
Dear sir,
I take great offense at your assertion that CF developers are suckers. I shall post a 500-word rebuttal when I find the time.
Oh, and I just read Peter’s comments again, and it struck me that he misunderstood what I meant by the phrase “feed the trolls”. I wasn’t calling people actual trolls. That phrase has a very distinct meaning in this realm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
Sometimes we do feed the trolls, but I think more often than not these “controversial” articles are written by authors who are just ignorant of the facts. Correcting them isn’t really feeding the trolls
Completely agree, Justin, but as Peter pointed out, this “swarm, swarm, swarm” effect by the CF community tends to get very personal and off-topic in response. Like I said, just a few people need to correct the author, point out some weaknesses and then move on.
Beyond that, it’s feeding the trolls because the author is getting exactly what he/she wants, be it attention, bigger readership, more exposure, etc.
glad you mentioned this! these days i see it happen all the time… the javascript community do it often to flash developers… flash standards blah blah blah… always gets somebodys back up…
heres a break down of the your code is crap vs mine arguement cliche:
ruby guys [sucker punch]-> java guys
javascript guys[scucker punch]-> actions guys
sadly it actually works… perhaps we should learn from these fools? (i’d probably be a bigger fool then…)