How We Got Started in ColdFusion
On the first day of last month, we had a fun "How I Got Started in ColdFusion" day. The response was much bigger and better than I expected. Including blog entries, "How I got Started" stories in comments on different blog entries, and one Google+ entry, I have found and compiled 110 responses (sortable and filterable page of all stories I have found so far).
Where I could determine the answer, I tracked what version of ColdFusion each person was using and which year they started (though I did not attempt to determine one from the other). I also tracked broad categories of how people got started. One interesting thing that came from this was to see that there are really two different ways people get started in ColdFusion.
I instinctively agree with your point about relaxing over "doing things properly". Many of us picked up CF because we didn't have rigorous CS backgrounds and yet it allowed us to produce amazing things on the web. Remember Marc Funaro's blog post a while ago bemoaning the loss of the pure joy of making stuff work with a few tags as soon as DAOs, beans and DI frameworks became "de rigueur".
I wouldn't be without those tools and concepts now, but even though my code's much better these days in so many ways, those moments of excitement at getting a file to upload or a search result are rarer.
On the other hand, I have seen signs that things are going in a positive direction for our little community. Just last week I was at MuraCon in Sacramento and had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of CF developers that I'd never met before who are not part of the "established" CF Blogosphere/Twitter community. A lot of these people were using CF because they love Mura CMS. So I think that Greg's observation is right on the money. The key to growing the CFML community is to develop great applications.
But I'll be honest, I get a lot of push back on Adobe ColdFusion because it's a commercial / proprietary product. All the folks I deal with are working in open source technologies (let's face it: apart from Microsoft, no one is doing proprietary software development now). If I change the pitch to be a JBoss community project, a Free Open Source implementation of CFML, then folks are much, much more open to hearing about it.
I've managed to get a number of Clojure and Java developers to download Railo and try it out. They're mostly quite impressed. But then they want to know how to integrate Spring Security and all sorts of "Java Enterprise" questions... :)