Are you a "certified" ColdFusion developer?

I saw the following article on gadgetopia.com, and thought I'd include it as part of the series on being a ColdFusion "expert".

To quote Deane, "ColdFusion is so easy to use that people learn ColdFusion before they learn to program, and they often never bother to learn anything about programming in general because ColdFusion will let you do a lot without having to be a “programmer.""

As he says, once you get past a certain level of complexity with an application, you really need to draw on a deeper level of programming knowledge than just throwing CFOUTPUT tags on a page.

And that's where quite a few ColdFusion "developers" fail, and that's how we end up in situations like that presented in the first article in the series, where a person with seven years of ColdFusion experience comes near to failing a competency test, because it covers portions of the language outside of his day-to-day comfort zone.

He never needed those features, never learned them, and for him, they might have well as not existed at all.

Interestingly, PHP also suffers from a lack of developers who also understand how to program. Indeed, when the feature list for PHP 5 was drawn up to include object support, many "old-time" PHP developers asked why such a thing was needed. After all, PHP was not Java.

Sound familiar?

As such, many scripting languages, including ColdFusion, get a bad rap for promoting bad code and bad development practices. Getting started is, in some cases, simply TOO easy. That's fine when you're playing around or doing a personal site or perhaps a few pages for a friend. But bad when you now think you're a "web developer" and start printing up business cards.

And worse for the business who stakes their site and their reputation on your skills.

Given that today's world is based more and more on the internet, can we continue to suffer unprofessional web developers? When simple logic errors can take down entire sites, and when bugs can expose reams of personal data, do we really want amateurs developing our core systems?

Passing a certification test may not mean that you're a professional developer, and in no way implies that your skill set is complete.

But it at least tells me that you know more than CFQUERY and CFOUTPUT.

And that's a start.

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Lest you think I'm picking on ColdFusion here, Deane makes the same case for PHP developers.

Comments

[James R. Taylor]

Agreed. We test and certify engineers in other disciplines to make sure they're qualified to do the job, and there's also usually some sort of path to follow before you get the job of designing the bridge from scratch.