Calling *ALL* ColdFusion developers
I’ve been running a poll for almost a week now located here – it is simply one question and requires a mere 3 clicks – one to click the link above, one to select an option and one to click the vote button. At the moment I’m showing 254 responses, that’s a mere 0.05% of the alleged 500,000 ColdFusion developers in the world – that’s pretty poor – to get even 1% would require 5000 votes! I’ve blogged about it, twittered it and put a link in the ColdFusion Support forums – I need to reach more of the community.
So I’m asking you, if you haven’t responded already please do so, if you run a user group please include the link in your mailings, if you know a developer that lives under a rock and doesn’t read blogs, forums or twitter then please send the link to them…..unless there are only 254 ColdFusion developers remaining 
Related posts:
John,
not everyone reads blogs or the CF support forums or is on Twitter.
Me, I stumbled across your survey on a blog aggregator. The reason I answered is simple, I am interested in the results myself.
But, people who are not interested in this might not bother to answer, because they have no idea what your reason for this survey is.
>Me, I stumbled across your survey on a blog aggregator.
ha, so you do read blogs
(ish)
the reasons for the poll are simple – to answer the question, are we an ageing population? Is what Adobe telling us that ColdFusion is growing year on year actually true – so far, I’m not convinced…remember though, I’m a ColdFusion developer through and through. I want to get an objective view on the state of ColdFusion from the ground.
Those numbers are about the same when I did CF IDE surveys in the past. Like yourself I found the numbers a bit odd considering how large the CF community is supposed to be…
The community of people using ColdFusion is large but the ones who care is very small, look at the UKCFUG Turn outs of late (Ok the Railo one was high)
I just quickly checked some simple facts. It seems that the number of 500k was taken out of the blue. One day and someone just sticked with it. Just check following links and check the dates:
All document were found using following URL: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&hs=Kg5&q=%22500%2C000+coldfusion%22&btnG=Search&meta=
1. right below the title it says year 2000:
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:Xx5no5ivIw8J:https://pbdj.sys-con.com/node/42235+%22500,000+coldfusion%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=uk&client=firefox-a
2. the book publication date says December 01 (2001?):
http://www.mcgraw-hill.com.au/html/9780072194753.html
3. This one is hard to estimate, I think it was year 2000. In the link you can find “cfun2k”. First the link:
http://www.cfconf.org/cfun2k/talks/cf_program_phil.html
and then just check this page:
http://www.cfconf.org/
at the end of the list you can find: “July, 2000 CFUN-2K (ColdFusion User Conference 2000) in Bethesda, MD” which goes to http://www.cfconf.org/cfun2k/index.cfm
the link is quite similar.
4. This one is Winter 2005, you can see that in the document footer
http://www.cablecenter.org/documents/newsletter.cfm?edition=2005Fourth
In all of these documents if you look for the phrase “500″ you’ll find the statement saying something in the manner:
“there are 500,000 ColdFusion developers (worldwide)”
So this implicates two things.
1. Someone took the number out of nowhere. And now Kristen Schofield (http://www.webbschofield.com/enclosures/Adobe%20ColdFusion%20Evangelism%20Kit.pdf) just sticks with that number because it is easier, she doesn’t know how many CF developers there exactly is. Oh yes, on page 2 Kristen says “* EDC 2007 Developer Population and Demographics Report”. Try google for it:
Most of us is forced to trust Kristen. I know it is easy to pick the number and point the report that can’t be easily verified as the source. So the number is obious lie, or ….
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=MiQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=EDC+2007+Developer+Population+and+Demographics+Report&spell=1
Between other results you will find following document:
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/601380/global_developer_population_and_demographic.pdf
At the end it says you can order that report to verify the number for only … €13,375.00/copy
2: … it did not changed since (at least) 2000. Is that good if you take under consideration the fact that since 2000 there were 3 new ColdFusion releases, huge investments made into the product, web market grown massively since then, RoR was popularized, .NET was introduced, and so on…
IMO the number of people who voted here will make around 0.5% of total CF developers population. That would estimate there is roughly 70k CF developers worldwide.
It is not my intention bashing CF here, I’m just facing this single number – “500k developers worldwide”.
Agreed to Chris’ comment.
I can assure you, out of the 10 ColdFusion developers in my office, only me who follow ColdFusionBloggers and thus found this post.
radekg,
I have no doubt Adobe is doing research [at least yearly] into the number of ColdFusion developers. And I suspect that Adobe paid for a copy of the report you found.
I bet less than 1% of developers read blogs and are active in the Internet Community. I’d be very surprised if as many as .001% of all the world’s CF Developers found this blog and answered the survey.