Friday, May 25, 2007

Top 10 Dead Technologies

So YC News (or maybe it was Slashdot) had a link to the Top 10 Dead (or Dying) Technologies. Lo and behold, check out number 5 (I'll even save you the clicking and quote it here:


5. ColdFusion

This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages.

Debates continue over whether ColdFusion is as robust and scalable as its competitors, but nevertheless, premiums paid for ColdFusion programmers have dropped way off, according to Foote. "It was really popular at one time, but the market is now crowded with other products," he says.


The real tragedy is that pretty much all my professional experience (i.e. worthy of putting on a resume) is with ColdFusion. Talk about a waste.

To make matters worse, management recently chose (god forbid they leave it up to the people actually writing the code) the only language that competes with ColdFusion in the over-engineered-stupidly-verbose-mind-and-soul-killer category: ASP.NET 2.0.

Time to put on some Incubus to make the pain go away. Anyone know how I can make $20k a year part time?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

network administration and novell are also dying, interesting. KU still rocks netware solutions in it's offices and every small business needs at least a contract admin around to restart modems or notice that the cat-5 cable was kicked out of the wall socket.

Everything else I agree with, you yourself mentioned that coldfusion was dying approximately a year ago. OS/2 was laughable when I encountered it at dads work.

Figure out a way to work for KU, they pay top dollar for people with experience and connections.

Anonymous said...

I know this post is over a year old, but I've just got to troll on it. I'm so sick of the "coldfusion is dead" BS. I'm making 6 figures as a senior CF developer and have been since 2001. ColdFusion is powering a LOT of top tier sites: MySpace, Federal Express, The Economist, Lonely Planet, US Department of State, dozens of universities, Lowes, Logitech, RIAForge, MMORPG.com, Hasbro, HP, AT&T, US Bank... and on and on. If you're wallowing in unemployed self-pity over your "dead" skillset, its your own stinkin fault.

Andrew said...

Uh, I quit that job voluntarily, and CF sucks, but I'd be happy to be (over)paid in the six figure range to work with it.

Your list is also out of date. I am a US Bank customer and their site definitely uses JSP. Also MySpace mostly migrated to ASP.NET, using the Bluedragon.NET platform to compile CF to run on the CLR. I'm sure there are places that still use it. If so, I'm well qualified, so what.

Maybe you missed the point of the entry (and this blog). I choose to be underemployed (and sometimes unemployed). There is no self-pity. So kindy STFU.

Anonymous said...

My summer vacation will come to an end again. I thought it was boring. But after reading your post I realized how lucky am I to have a break from my frustrations-and that is SCHOOL- even for a while. Now I am so excited to go to school again. And to show how I am prepared and ready to have higher grades. Your post is so inspiring. THANK YOU. XD