Java is the SUV of pro­gram­ming tools is the title of a great post by MIT’s Philip Green­spun. I love the analogy:

But the pro­gram­mers and man­agers using Java will feel good about them­selves because they are using a tool that, in the­ory, has a lot of power for han­dling prob­lems of tremen­dous com­plex­ity. Just like the sub­ur­ban­ite who dri­ves his SUV to the 7–11 on a paved road but feels good because in the­ory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope.

He backs up all his state­ments… it’s an inter­est­ing read. The post was trig­gered by the expe­ri­ences of a comp sci class at MIT. The stu­dents using PHP and ASP.Net appar­ently had a much eas­ier time of it than the poor schmucks who chose JSP. But, I can’t help won­der­ing how an equiv­a­lent project using Cold­Fu­sion would have fared. My expe­ri­ences quot­ing PHP and ASP clas­sic have been that PHP takes slightly longer than CF to code, and depend­ing on the require­ments ASP clas­sic can take any­where up to twice as long. Main­te­nance time has a sim­i­lar sav­ing. What kind of vehi­cle would that make CF?

On an almost related note, I remem­ber being totally awed by Phil’s photo.net back when I was at uni, in 95 or 96. It was a travel blog before they were even invented. I had a look tonight and it’s now a busy-looking photo com­mu­nity site. Nice to see it’s still around and still mov­ing forward.