Making The Leap

So, this being my first article about my journey will automatically make it short. Really, what I hope to do is document some of the trials and tribulations I’ve incurred making the switch from ColdFusion programmer to Ruby on Rails programmer.

Let me start by telling you a little about myself. At least my history as it pertains to CF. Back in ‘95 or ‘96, I worked at the UPS facility in Dallas as an MS Access programmer in the Industrial Engineering dept. My manager and the “webmaster” decided to leave and form their own consulting company. A few days later, I was asked if I could update a company directory web page.

Up until this point, I had always thought of web programming as more “artsey fartsey” kind of stuff only meant for people that were good with graphics. It took me a while to figure out where everything was on the server, but after looking at the tag based language of CF, I got up to speed pretty quickly.

That was version 3.1 and I’ve used every version since then on up until CFMX7. So why am I changing to Ruby and Rails now? Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never been really comfortable with the tag based nature of CF. Sure it’s easy, but I’ve always been more comfortable programming in languages that look similar to javascript or c or even Java. Also, I’ve fallen hard for the Ruby language itself. There are so many neat things about it, I can’t even figure out where to start. Plus, Ruby is an OO language from the get go. CFMX is OO also, but it feels like it’s bolted on. I feel similarly about c++.