TIOBE Reconsiders

After writing my post yesterday about Coldfusion being removed from the TIOBE Index I decided to send an email to TIOBE to question their decision and ask them how they justified their actions on clearly inaccurate information.

This morning I received an email from TIOBE inviting me to check out an addition to their FAQ.

# Q: Who is Richard Bremner? (Bonus question only for this month, especially for the ColdFusion community)

Don't blame Richard Bremner for removing ColdFusion from the TIOBE index. The TIOBE company made this decision based on Richard's suggestion. The many, many mails from the ColdFusion community that this is plain wrong, forced us to reconsider this. ColdFusion still appears to be no a programming language at second thought, but CFML definitely is. CFML is tagged, like HTML and XML, but unlike HTML and XML, it is Turing complete. So CFML counts as a language. It will be added to the list as a separate entity from next month on. Unfortunately, CFML would be at position 135 if the TIOBE index would have been published today. In order to compensate for the harm done to the ColdFusion community we are thinking about putting an idea of Matthew Drayer into practice: having another index that measures the popularity of web application frameworks. This includes ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, Django, Groovy, etc. we think this is an index a lot of people are waiting for.

This is somewhat good news, the issue is of course that CFML and Coldfusion are often used interchangeably. We as a community don't really make a differentiation between ColdFusion the server and Coldfusion Markup Langauge (CFML) the language. If we are talking about the server we add "server" at the end otherwise its just Coldfusion when talking about the language.

I still think they don't get it over at TIOBE. Coldfusion Server is an Web Application Server not a web application framework there is a big difference and not just in capitalization.

To separate the two (Coldfusion and CFML) doesn't seem to make must sense at all to me and seems to be too fine a difference. It would make more sense to index both CFML and Coldfusion together and return Coldfusion to the index.