No wonder they chose a word that rhymes with “confusion” to name their “language”. One of the sites I’ve been working on for flyte was done in Coldfusion and it’s driving me insane.  I’m not a Dreamweaver user, I do my sites by hand because I’m cantankerous and old-fashioned.  I also think tacos are too spicy and prefer to eat my steak through a straw*. I guess my main beef with it is that I have to mix my code and my design elements together that makes things messy. And there, I think, is the heart of my issue: I don’t like messy code, I crave order and structure in my programming so that I may have disorder and chaos in the visually creative world.

Ever since PHP gained OO capabilities, they were less than stellar but a step in the right direction. Now they’re improved (esp. now with some actual namespace support) and I’ve made it my choice for rapid web development using MVC architectural patterns. I’m not attempting to start a flame war. I do not dislike any of the other languages or framework systems out there, but it’s got a familiar syntax, is well supported, and does everything I need it do to with reasonable amounts of speed. If not PHP, then I work in Java, for most of the same reasons; plus with XSL I can actually port between languages for the heavy lifting without having to make changes to my templates.

So, here I am, trying to get as much as I can done with CF and it’s been slow going. Sometimes I think it almost needs DW to be effectively programmed with any real speed. Of course I know that’s not true because of how similar it is to many other markup languages, it’s just a little smarter. I think that’s where it becomes more difficult to work with, because it does emulate many language features, but inside of a markup format that I’m not familiar with using. That’s where Dreamweaver would come in real handy.

The purpose of me writing this is to vent some frustration while I’m working on this site. I need to do so many things that I know how to do so well in other languages, such as parsing delimited files, graphics manipulation, input validation, and more. I’m almost positive I could do most (if not all) of those things, but it just doesn’t seem to be sinking in how to do it because I keep having to look at design elements alongside the code which confuses me to no end.

Does that make me some kind of snob? I mean, after all, myspace is done in CF. Actually, that almost helps me rest my case because it’s such a terrible looking site. I can’t help but think that if they had used an MVC-capable and extensible language they could have at least made it less hideous. As I like to say, it’s eye-gougingly good. This wasn’t meant to be a rail on that horrible site, but I can’t help myself - when the opportunity is presented, I simply must accept.

But really… does that make me a snob? That I don’t like these new fangled coding techniques? Am I some sort of dinosaur? Am I holding on too tight to my C and Pascal memories from years gone by? Or am I one of those people who has to buy the loaded version of something even if I’m only going to use one or two parts? I think a combination of both, but is that so bad? I think I’d almost like to be called a ‘purist’ when it comes to my development style. I look at some of the new stuff coming along, and I keep feeling like I need to give up a lot of control in the name of speeding things up.

Maybe the moral here is: if you take your time, do it right, and are comfortable, it doesn’t matter which language(s) you use, as long as you use them well. Crap. Now I feel like getting back into it. Thanks, blog.

* Both of those statements are lies