Coldfusion... why???

Is it some sort of sin to mention ColdFusion around here?

Anyway... I'm trying to schedule some classes for my degree program and I note that one of my required courses is ColdFusion... why?

Some Questions:

1. What is ColdFusion good for?
2. Who is hiring ColdFusion experience?
3. Is this going to be one of those classes I regret sinking $$ into in 5 years?

The school uses ColdFusion for all of its web apps and I've never seen one yet on the site that didn't err out on me at least twice. Not only that, even requests that seem like they should be relatively simple from my perl-minded point of view seem to take an eternity to complete with cfm modules.

I could take FORTRAN if I want!

PHP, Perl, Coldfusion, not simialir, yet all have one thing in common: They're serverside languages.

Coldfusion makes simple things simple and hard things impossible, as a saying I once heard. I don't know many people that hire and require you knowing Coldfusion. It's either ASP, PHP, or Perl. I think learning Coldfusion is useless, and don't know what is wrong with your school They seam to enjoy taking the hard route.

Recommendation: only learn it if you really have to.

The trouble with my school is that I'm short on $$ so I'm stuck in a crummy little Comm. College. I was afraid this was the sort of thing ColdFusion was...

Blah... if you want to learn something right, you have to learn it yourself. Fortuneatly I'm armed with plenty of C/C++ and perl books, as well as some Java stuff. Of course.. I also have a VB6 book / compiler for laughs

Thanks for the input Derek!

haha, well that stuff auta get u somewhere

Coldfusion ... I'd love to learn sth like that.
Here on my school i'm learning Turbo Pascal. Useless for any reason.

I'm assuming Coldfusion is a proprietary thing. I despise that. There's nothing more annoying than crap like ASP, VB6, C#, etc. where the only way to learn how to even program in it is to go out and blow an obnoxious amount of money on a prorietary compiler that will need updated at $100 a pop every year or so.

I learned perl with free software.
I learned JavaScript with free software.
I'm learning C++ with a compiler that came with the book.
I learned the basics of DataBase programming with free software (MySQL).
I have a free web server (Apache).
I'm going to learn Java and JSP with free software.

Given all that, what makes these companies thing I want to give them another $300 to learn languages that can do maybe HALF what these can? Give me a freakin break.

Yes, but Pascal was at least a general purpose language - CF is limited to simple DB stuff and proprietary.

I share your Pascal pain, though. Our CS teacher can't use Windoze 2K properly, but knows all Pascal commands by heart.

C# has its free compiler bundled with the .NET RTM SDK (acronym city). Just pick up notepad and start coding and compiling, as for references the msdn has a pretty good reference on it with all the API pretty well documented.

VB6 you can pick up the standard edition for less than 80 quid, and that hasnt had a major version update for ages... until .Net

Let me rephrase then: I hate Micro$oft and I won't use their poor excuses for programming languages. I would rather write assembly code in the sand at high tide than use C# or .NET. I would rather try to pick the hairs off a live gorilla to create a binary representation of my code than use Micro$oft code. I would... etc. etc. :P No offense to Micro$oft programmers though... I didn't say I didn't like you personally, I just hate Micro$oft!


Actually, I have a copy of it that I keep for when I want to write joke-type programs. In this case, it just irritates me that Micro$oft made this highly unstable language and wants to sell it to me for $80 and I have no other way to obtain it. THAT is what annoys me.

There is a free version of Macromedia's ColdFusion called ColdFusion Express available for Linux and Windows. It does not have all of the features, but most of the good ones are there. It definately has the things you need to have to learn the academics of programming...

My Web group at work uses Java, Perl, etc... but I always send newbie programmers to ColdFusion classes first. Why? Because it is so simple that the syntax does not get in the way of learning the programming concepts. Once you master CF, you can move on to other more arcane and strict languages.