I had a cool post about jQuery Mobile planned, but realized (right before I saved it) that I was completely wrong and that my post was pretty worthless. Feeling down - I thought it might be nice to share this email I got yesterday:

I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work you have done over the years with Coldfusion. I have recently acquired a job as a Coldfusion programmer and was previously a .NET developer and given this fact I never tried Coldfusion, so much like the rest of the .NET community I kind of shunned on ColdFusion. Having concentrated on learning it I have grown to admire it and thoroughly enjoy using it. It makes things much easier and quite a bit more programmer friendly.

I just wanted to write and thank you for the site as it has been a tremendous help to me as I have been learning and hope that you keep up the good work.

I wrote back asking the reader (Shawn) if he minded sharing a bit more about his experiences coming to ColdFusion. I'm always curious how folks from other languages find ColdFusion and what they think about it. Here is his followup:

Having a background as a .Net programmer over the past 6 yrs I wanted to give some perspective on ColdFusion. I recently obtained a job as a web developer and was hired based on my programming background. I quickly learned that all the websites(over 25 of them) were programmed in ColdFusion and of course as a programmer with a .NET background this both made me question why ColdFusion was being used and why I was needed, since my background was not in CF. Needless to say, I took it as a challenge as I had previously converted a site from CF to VB.NET. Since I have had to learn CF I have come to admire it and actually enjoy programming a bit more. I have been given the task of deciding on whether or not to keep CF or migrate all the websites to VB.NET and upon learned CF and how it works I have come to the realization that CF is a better option for a few reasons. CF is easy to learn...since I have had no experience with CF whatsoever, I have been able to do things that took me much longer to do in .NET and it makes it easier for someone else to learn what I have done thus increasing productivity as a team. Having said all this, I look forward to CF 10 and hope that any .NET programmers out there that have a negative outlook on ColdFusion, at least give it a try and see what it is about and you just might like it. As a programmer, having learned to use CF it has made my job much easier and a bit more fun at the same time.

It's nice to know that productivity, something ColdFusion has always focused on, seems to be the killer feature. Not so much tag A or function B, but rather, making difficult things easy. That's been job one since day one and I think it's truly what makes ColdFusion special. I've got respect for other languages of course, but few have dedicated so much effort to help you get things done. Here's to ColdFusion Zeus - where the tradition will continue!