"A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination."
- Nelson Mandela

This post is in response to the recent bashing and false claims made about Coldfusion, Flash and Adobe. To get an idea (if you aren't already familiar) with what I'm talking about read the comments left on digg, ColdFusion 8 Launches. I know that the vast majority of digg readers are high school students, but regardless of age I think that people should do research and put some merit behind their claims. Here is what I have to say in response to them:

1. If a company (or government agency) can afford to purchase it, they (typically) can afford to pay you top dollar.
   
   
2. If you can't afford the one time payment of $1300 to purchase a license, then chances are you can't afford to run a dedicated box anyways. Where is the benefit in using a free alternative then? Shared hosting for CF can be found for the same price as any other language.
   
   
3. Some people have mentioned that CF has been "re-written" (meaning, released a new version) every few years. I didn't realize that constantly improving performance and adding more language features was a bad thing. When was the last time your language was refactored?
   
   
4. How come no one has bashed on JSP yet? At the end of the day CF is just like JSP (if not a more enhance version of it), it provides a markup syntax, an ecma like syntax alternative, can run in a J2EE container and gets compiled into Java byte code. Sounds like there is very little difference to me.
   
   
5. Flash = 90%+ market penetration, meaning 90%+ browsers are Flex enabled. Funny how some think that translates in a dead or dying technology. Where is the animated vector graphic support in DHTML or server side data pushing in Ajax?
   
   
6. All of the talk about CF and increased productivity is true. What other language can you expose any functionality in a SOAP enabled web service with one tag attribute (access="remote")? Read the live docs if don't believe me.
   
   
7. Adobe provides enterprise support services, when was the last time you asked a question and didn't receive a snide remark from someone who was too uber or 1337 to help you? Relying on community support is great until you hit a snag under deadline thats going to cut into someones WOW or 2nd life play time.
   
   
8. When you finally graduate high school and/or migrate from your parent's basement, you will realize that you need to earn a living and that the vast majority of the jobs you find coding in PHP\Ruby are no more lucrative than working as a delivery driver full time (however there are many exceptions to that statement). Your misconception of corporate greed and business economics will soon fade when you know that you make a great living if only you had decided to at least learn that other "dead language".