Page 2 - Convince me to learn CF instead of PHP

Well, I'm about half way through a recommended book ("PHP and MySQL Web Development") and alls I can say is.... DAAAAAAAMMN. PHP rocks! I can't wait to start on this project I'm doing. So many things I'm running across that are just little niceties that I never had in ASP. Example: "stripslashes" and "addslashes". I know thats a small thing, but there are lots of small things like this that I'm finding, and all those small things add up to quite a bit. I'm jazzed.

As far as MS goes, they do make a lot of good products. Not all of their products are the BEST by any means, but a lot of their products are very good. Alrightythen, I'm off to go play my XBOX.

I'm not sure how qualified I am to speak on this. That said I'm going to speak anyway ...

It seems to me that what is the better thing to learn would depend quite a bit on exactly what your job is.

I am a technical writer, and as such I need to be able to code HTML in order to present my documetnation on the internet or an intranet. That presentation can often go beyond simple HTML to include CSS and JS. A natural extension to these plain text languages would be XML and CF so that the information presented can be dynamically supplied from a DB, etc.

It would not be a natural extension for me to learn a regular programming language. That's more for programmers, and they come at the same issue from the opposite direction. It would be as natural to me as it would be natural for a programmer to learn to use FrameMaker.

Right smack in the middle, you have web developers. These folks are specialist in web design and web enablement. As such they should know the most commonly used tools and languages cold, and should also be familiar enough with the other various options that they will recognize when something not as common would be the best solution for the project at hand.

There is no reason really that a person can't learn it all regardless of their job, but their job (and their project needs) can at least provide them with a priority sort on what to learn. Not to mention that "it all" can be quite a long list.