Things aren’t looking too hot for ColdFusion on the TIOBE index lately.  Have a look:

TIOBE Programming Community Index

It’s hard to spot, but you’ll find “CFML” waaaay at the bottom in the 50 – 100 list.  It’s listed in alphabetical order rather than ranked by popularity because, according to Tiobe, the differences in popularity among the bottom 50 were so marginal that it made little sense to order them.  Yikes.  As someone who’s been programming in ColdFusion for so many years, that’s a hard pill to swallow.

Interestingly, it seems to go along with what I’m seeing in the community for ColdFusion developers seeking work.  Programmers that have a pretty advanced toolset are jumping to other platforms where the jobs are more plentiful and they’re doing well.  Candidates who respond to my openings for ColdFusion developers don’t always have the chops, and it takes a very long time to locate and hire qualified candidates for ColdFusion jobs. That does make sense if the language is truly as unpopular as the TIOBE index suggests.

I began looking at this a few days ago when I found a two+ year old article regarding the release of the iOS SDK by Apple.  I can’t find the article now or I would link to it, but the author was opining about the bad decision by Apple to release an SDK for a popular platform like iOS that requires programmers to use Objective-C, an unpopular choice from the author’s perspective.  Clicking the same link above, a flash forward of more than two years from that article, and you’ll see Objective-C jumped from being very low on the index to being the #8 most popular language today!

It’s surprising how quickly things can change. As developers, we should be prepared for sudden shifts and keep our toolsets up to date and ready for what may come.