After more than 27 years of working with and writing ColdFusion code, I’ve come to a weirdly emotional fork in the road. This fork isn’t just about saying goodbye to a framework or language I know, but to an entire phase of my professional life.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a lengthy LinkedIn post about how I felt ColdFusion has been getting a bad rap through no fault of its own. Adobe has done a good job of improving ColdFusion and its reputation over the years, and when I wrote that post, I was still convinced that ColdFusion could handle a lot of our development needs. There’s a big part of me that still does. I swore to continue singing its praises, and even though I am still down in the weeds of ColdFusion every day in my job, my song has grown quieter.

My ColdFusion Origin Story

ColdFusion has been a massive influence in my career, and it has been very good to me professionally. It helped me to break into the IT world, it paid my bills (and then some), and it helped me build a life and career that I am genuinely proud of. I even authored a ColdFusion book. So, please know, I’m not here to hate on ColdFusion. In fact, anyone who knows me personally will tell you that I have a soft spot for it and get a weird thrill about sneaking in an occasional bit of snarkiness when someone in my organization mentions how the “replacement” is having its own issues.

However, my long-time love affair with ColdFusion has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for the last 15 or so years because right around 2010, everyone kept telling me it would “be gone in a year”. That’s a stressful way to live when it’s your career! And here we are 15 years later…and I’m still writing CF code today.

Back in the 90s, it was ahead of its time in many ways. It made developing web applications fast, easy, and dare I say…fun.

But alas…nothing lasts forever. This will probably get me kicked out of the ColdFusion Fan Club, but I have come around to the belief that it’s time for most developers and organizations to move on from ColdFusion, but maybe not for the reason you think.

Technology is Changing Fast!

Organizations demand scalability, innovation demands speed, and the explosion of cloud architectures has made languages like Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript much more popular for app development. Just do a quick Google search for popular web development languages, and ColdFusion doesn’t even make the list.

13 Best Languages for Web Development in 2025
Best Programming Languages for Web Development
Tiobe Software Index
The 7 Best Web Development Languages
What Programming Languages Do You Use the Most (Even Reddit has forgotten ColdFusion)

These are just Google results, but take a look at them. Their recommendations are backed by polls, community involvement, and other criteria. This isn’t just an opinion of a few random people who hate ColdFusion. Does it mean that ColdFusion can’t scale? Can’t innovate? Can’t work with cloud architectures? Absolutely not, we all know it can! However you want to look at it, the fact remains (and this is where it hurts), ColdFusion isn’t popular among developers in general, and THAT is a huge problem.

These other options, like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, don’t have a huge upfront investment, they are highly community-supported, and constantly evolving and growing the developer pool. ColdFusion, on the other hand, well, it lives in a bit of a bubble all its own.

Don’t get me wrong, Adobe has made efforts to modernize and keep up with technology, and ColdFusion developers are some of the most passionate professionals I know, but the ecosystem around ColdFusion is relatively small and getting smaller. It’s a very niche language trying to survive in a world that is leaning into mainstream languages that don’t cost money, and everyone is familiar with.

It’s not necessarily a terrible thing to be niche. Niche tools and languages can be powerful, and hey, for us developers, can often lead to higher-paying gigs as the talent pool decreases. But for organizations, a limited talent pool isn’t a good thing, as it makes long-term scalability difficult.

The Truth is ColdFusion Talent is Moving On

If you’ve tried to hire a ColdFusion developer in the last 5 to 10 years, you may have felt a little like you were looking for a needle in a haystack. They are out there, but the good ones are hard to find, and even harder to figure out which candidates are inflating how much they actually know.

There was a saying years ago that the best thing about ColdFusion was how easy it was to write CF code, and the worst thing about ColdFusion was how easy it was to write CF code. ColdFusion is tag-based, making it easy to learn, but also easy to write bad code and have it still function…sort of. Poorly written code by developers who never really learned what true development looks like, but learned ColdFusion due to its ease of use, has made the life of a skilled ColdFusion developer today, incredibly frustrating, but also, somewhat prolonged the career for a few of us…so thank you.

This lack of good talent can make it a pretty risky move for any organization to keep putting ColdFusion at the center of their tech stack. And let’s be clear, it’s not because anything is wrong with the ColdFusion language. My personal belief is that with the right ColdFusion developer behind an application, it’s just as secure, scalable, and stable as any other platform. But the cold, hard truth is that I have changed my mindset about sticking it out with ColdFusion because it’s impossible to continue developing, scaling, onboarding, and innovating when the ColdFusion developer pool is shrinking and most of the remaining developers’ time is spent fixing poorly written or legacy code.

Why update an application that’s 15 years old with a ColdFusion rewrite when the pool of good developers is dwindling in size?

Organizations and stakeholders are asking themselves that very question. This puts ColdFusion developers in a difficult place should they be on the market looking for a new position. Opportunities are becoming fewer, and the ones that exist are nightmares to work in.

I know for many, efficiency is a buzzword that you’re sick of hearing. But the reality is, it’s important. In my career as a Lead Consultant for Excella, my company focuses on helping our clients focus on efficiency. We aren’t talking about just technical upgrades. We are talking about strategic moves that help organizations do more with less and demonstrate true value to stakeholders.  I can see firsthand how other modern languages and frameworks can reduce friction, speed up development cycles, and improve integrations, simply by having a large and skilled developer pool. That is true efficiency!

A Personal Shift

I’ll be honest, even though I have learned other languages during my career, I have had such a strong romance with ColdFusion for the last 27 years that it felt like a betrayal at first to make the move away from it. But as I have dug deeper into Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, and other languages/frameworks, I am realizing something very important: it’s not about abandoning the old, it’s about building on it.

ColdFusion taught me how to think like a developer. It helped me to understand user needs, code management and security, and performance optimization. Those lessons are important no matter what language you develop with. They are part of every line of code I write today, even if it’s in a different language.

If you’re a ColdFusion developer or even a leader in an organization still using ColdFusion, and you’re scared of the future and change, just know that you aren’t alone. There are many of us still out there running mission-critical apps on ColdFusion, while other teams tear it apart into smaller pieces to be migrated away. It’s a punch in the gut, but trust me, sometimes moving forward means letting go of what’s comfortable.