I learned today in this post by Ben Forta that TIOBE has declassified ColdFusion as a programming language, meaning that Coldfusion (who recently improved it's rankings to place in the top 20) has been completely removed from it's index including historical references.
According to a news flash on their website:
Richard Bremner pointed out that ColdFusion is not a programming language. It is a framework comparable to JSP and ASP. As a consequence, ColdFusion has been removed from the TIOBE list. All its history has been deleted, which means that the history of the index has changed a bit as well.
As Ben Forta said: "I have no idea of who Richard Bremner is, or who made him the authority on the subject, but ... he's either mistaken, ignorant, or some combination thereof."
I agree with Ben on this one for sure. I understand removing ASP and JSP as they are "parts" of VB and Java respectively and are not in and of themselves programming languages.
I can only assume at Mr. Bremner reasoning in saying that because CFML compiles into Java bytecode it is not a distinct programming language.
But by that reasoning of course all "programming languages" are merely frameworks built on top of the Binary language.