I've got a client worried that the pool of potential future programmers who can use ColdFusion is in question. What do you think? Is there any data out there supporting this? I wonder what the count would be of CF programmers globally?

Nobody really knows that number, but the reality is any competent programmer can be hired and trained to work on your app.

That's the kind of reply I was thinking of giving them.

your client can worry about that - but any language has that risk over time. The better question for them is : can they afford to re-tool their applications and do they need new features currently? I have seen several people migrate to .NET because is so dominate now, but the cost and time can be prohibative.

The REAL question IMO is whether or not your app/code/culture/practices are the sort of things that a developer wants to work with.

True but I also have at least 25 years until I can retire so I can always work for your client :)

I've found that junior devs with good experience in modern dev practices are happy to come work on a modern CF code base with MVC, testing, CI, source control, agile methods, etc, etc. But not one wants to come work on your (hypothetical) ugly legacy spaghetti code, no matter how popular the language is.

that is so true

So, as a company, they should focus more on creating an culture that attracts devs more than a language that attracts them

i like my applications like i like my women

@websolete Independent, robust, agile, fault tolerant, easy to use, attractive...

Our company had this same concern, so much so they tried to re-write a very large application in another language (it didnt go so well 😬). Over the past few years we have moved from our CFML app being a legacy app and added modern tooling, debugging etc, and moved devs from other teams into the CFML team without much issue. Code is really code wether its got curly braces or not 😉. As Brad has said, its not about the language, its about the culture, good devs want to solve problems. That said, we recently went to market for a Senior dev and I was quite surprised by the amount of CVs that came through with significant CFML experience in the last few years. There is a lot of it around.

Last Summit I proved you can take a developer who is competent in nearly any language, and with a little work, get them to pass the Adobe Certified Professional: Adobe ColdFusion cert. I brought in a guy who was a C#.net expert, another who had 5 years of Java, and an excellent JS developer with Python skills and a really good handle on OOP. Every single one passed with flying colors. The C#.net guy has now taken over his company's architecture on their ColdFusion, and the new code is gorgeous. The other guys are developing CF apps because of how fast it is. We did a back of a napkin math estimate earlier this year, and based on some (admitedly somewhat fuzzy) calculations, there's about 50,000 CFML devs in the world. Now, are they ALL currently doing CF? Probably not, or they're doing multiple stacks at once including CF. But what @bdw429s said is 1 million percent true: YOU DO NOT NEED TO HIRE A CF DEV. The language is not some kind of ancient unknowable lost code. There's some oddities, but it takes very little time to learn the outliers and start coding like crazy.

Day 1, arrays are 1 based. day 2 they should be 100% up-to-speed.

After I left one fairly complex medical research app, the new leader wanted to rewrite it in java. 3 years later I heard it wasn't done. 4 years later it was gone, and so was the new leader. Changing horses in a non-trial app may not be as easy as dreaming up the idea of doing that.

I would approach it as CFML syntax is easy enough. A caveman can do it; and complex enough, NASA and the fortune 1000s use it. If you like technical debt, which costs more than taking any programmer in any web language and giving them 4-6 weeks to learn ColdFusion. Yes, even at a 200K USD salary, the ROI for teaching or allowing a programmer to self-study is more than sufficient to offset the costs of technical debt with any language, including Python, Java, C#, and so on and so forth. Follow it up with charts, a nice Do Something app, such as CRUD application, and show side-by-side code comparison.