Wait, wtf, what is boxlang ? And what does it mean for the future of CF ?!

https://pypi.org/project/boxlang/ ? https://github.com/mdrwsh/box-lang ? (and, yes I know it's the Ortus one as per https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ortus-solutions.vscode-boxlang / https://uspto.report/TM/98173541

ITB keynote is answering this question

We all know what "open source" means in the CFML world, @elpete. If one uses an Ortus FOSS project, one is vendor-locked-in to Ortus, for all intents and purposes. No harm in being realistic about that.

Yeah... I'm keen to hear what the Lucee organisation has to say at CFCamp in June, they've been very quiet around here of late...

"A very small subset of that CFML base uses Lucee" - is this conjecture or is there some data to back that up @Adam Cameron? I would personally assume ACF numbers higher than Lucee, but I really have no more to go on than gut. The State of the CF Union survey certainly points otherwise, but I realize the limited reach and likely respondents. Same with Forgebox.io stats, which also point to a fairly even distribution between the 2 engines. Again, my gut says you're mostly correct, but I am curious if anyone has data or opinions on this...

I expect a small-ish number of organizations use Lucee compared to ACF but that Lucee is over-represented in terms of number of developers in this community

No data, no. Anecdote (which is not data, and in this case is second hand): most CFML devs never participate in our community. They work 9-5 in the US govt and some big US companies. They don't care about Adobe, let alone even have heard about Lucee. They care about putting in a shift, and going home to their lives. Second anecdote: The devs that attend Adobe's conferences - already outliers in the CF dev community - often have not even heard of Lucee. Lucee devs are far more community-engaged than the bulk of CF users, which is lovely, but disproportionately gives us the idea that Lucee matters in the broader CF user base. It doesn't.

It could have mattered, though. Being able to take your old CF app and have a modern engine parse it and an ecosystem to support it without just 'well I'm de-camping for (some other platform)' ... hard to say how big that pie could be, but Ortus has no doubt thought about that more than most

BoxLang might get traction with a subset of ppl who are heavily and totally invested in the *box ecosphere. But otherwise it seems like a... wayward... way of Ortus protecting its future.

Sure, but that first number could be peanuts or it could be millions of dollars. They know which of their clients on ACF would rather pay Ortus $2k per server than Adobe licensing fees. And that's just the people who are already their clients. We could conceivably pay Ortus for BoxLang one day because I know Lucee is not forever and have known that for some time. But we could also conceivably drop CF. We already did on the front end. If Ortus didn't do this, then we absolutely would have just left the CF ecosystem, whether that happens in a year or three years or five years. With BoxLang ... might could be we'll have a reason to stay, which tickles my nostalgia and personal investment in CF but it has to clear a much higher corporate bar to actually be a good decision.

"I know Lucee is not forever and have known that for some time" - again, conjecture, or have I missed something (other than the rather deafening silence from that camp...)

Forgive me, I'm speaking just for my company. Not predicting anything about the project itself.

Yes, their relative lack of engagement in the community, especially as of late, would make me very nervous if I had to depend upon it. Good news is great; bad news is unfortunate, but manageable and actionable; however, no news/silence is alarming. Thank you both for the feedback.

It's just a distinction between 'lucee has been great for us and filled a desperately-needed void' and 'as the years go on, what does the app engine / language choice look like today'

Everything that had been said here isn't based on any hard facts. These are just some subjective perceptions. I've heard cfml is dead for a long time. Lack of information opens the doors to theories. Who really knows? I just can see that the Lucee devs are working and merging on a daily basis. We will know more after cfcamp. Until then I'll be calm and move on.

Sure. This is a Slack. It is impossible to have 'hard facts' about what is a thoroughly subjective matter. I've seen Lucee devs make tons of commits some weeks and then we have a couple PRs that have been languishing for years where we just go and do our own thing. People sharing their own thing is what happens around here.

Well, it's a "hard fact" that there's been nearly zero communication from that team since Zac stopped actively participating. "Lack of information opens the doors to theories" - well, quite. As I said, it's the silence that is alarming. Otherwise, I agree with all you've said. Hopefully, it's all leading up to some bang-up, good news at CFCamp.

Are there any other insights to what boxlang really is? From what I can see until now, it's cfml with just another prefix "bx:" instead of "cf" (e.g. "bx:query", "bx:). No more Insight than that.

@andreas https://boxlang.io/why-boxlang

Thx @elpete I've already seen all that posts, but didn't see any boxlang code yet, no docs, no examples, no example app, or the typical "hello world" code. I think we'll see you all at cfcamp and know more then.

If Ortus want this to be taken seriously outside of a few CFML-using stragglers, they need to decouple that messaging from CFML. They would get more traction if they said "leveraging our 20yrs of COBOL experience!!"

Have you seen any code and mini app yet @Adam Cameron... And are you coming to cfcamp this time?

no and no.