Coldfusion : Worth the trouble to learn?

[drexle]

Greetings all,

I've been looking into the relative merits of ColdFusion (mostly since reading more about Flex) and I'm trying to decide whether it's really worth my time to try learning it. I'll be upfront, I know no 'middleware' languages. The ones I have looked at in the past just made my head hurt and I am not proficient in them to any measurable degree.

I've heard a lot of people say that ColdFusion is easier to get your head around than other languages such as perl or php, which is great... but it's proprietary and getting my hands on a dev environment is a pain. I found http://cfdeveloper.co.uk/, but I hate having to sign up with my name just to get a "free" ($5) account. There's also the factor that compared to perl, php, asp, and other such languages CF just doesn't enjoy the same level of support... and it is true that compared to the others I see precious few job postings explicitly requesting ColdFusion.

So... is it really worth the trouble? Is it better to have at least one such language than none at all, and if you had to know only one, would ColdFusion even make your short list?

[tg]

if you know actionscript, php will likely be easier to learn then cf.
with that said, cf is very easy to learn. however, if you're freelance, or the company you work for doesn't use coldfusion, then there really is no reason for you to learn it.

cf is used quite a bit by very large companys. its easy to learn and use, and has a very close connection to flash/flex. it can also utilize many if not most of the java libraries.

i work for a very large medical group. the company uses coldfusion, not as fully as they should, but they do use it, and it was very easy to pick up coming from an asp background.

you can always set up your own dev environment.

coldfusion comes with studio 8 (if you have that one). as long as you have IIS set up on your computer (windows) you can install sql and use cf to develope on that box.

[pigpen]

It can't hurt to know it, however PHP and ASP.NET is used far more often. If it's going to be your first web programming language, I'd suggest learning PHP or ASP.NET 2.0 first, which will make your life easier especially if your freelancing or contracting.