@tonyshowoff said:
@creayt Oh, no I wasn't, cfScript is vastly better. Admittedly my experience with CF is about 8 or so years out of date, but due to licensing, availability, and other issues I never consider it really. Full disclosure, I've always hated XML as well, and we use JSON or BSON for all of our transport/storage stuff in house where possible over XML. You may love ColdFusion, but I certainly do not, and I think that's fine.
It's not vastly better. That's like saying that an airplane is "vastly better" than a helicopter. They're two different beasts with different purposes, they each do certain things extremely well. I hate XML too. Good thing ColdFusion has literally nothing at all to do with XML except that it's able to parse, generate, and work with it extremely easily, the same way it can with JSON, and a zillion other things.
I guarantee you that if you and I sat down and created an identical product, and you saw that ColdFusion let me do it in about a third of the time it took you, and in a way that's actually more fun and flexible, you might love it too haha. I started out with PHP, which got me really excited about web development, and I still write PHP from time to time, helped my GF construct some objects from a MySQL query and serialize them to JSON in PHP the other day ( she was reimagining an example from a book she was reading ). When we were done we wrote the same code in ColdFusion, and it was something like 75% fewer lines of code. PHP has some strengths, but I've never met a PHP developer who could offer much more than "a lot of companies use it and there are a lot of things already written in PHP" as a competitive advantage. As far as the syntax, I mean Jesus. If you want to talk terrible syntax, PHP wins that contest by a mile.