IT is not... That was the case years ago, there are plenty of options now for server side processing of .cfml

Commercial:
http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/index.cfm
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

Open Source:
http://www.openbluedragon.org/

http://www.getrailo.com/

Tag availability and some functionality may be slightly different, but most applications will work on of the above with at most minor changes.

Who controls the language spec ?

No, they are not. "C" is an imperative/procedural language; there are languages belonging to a different paradigm.

I voted for "C" + OCaml (the latter impersonated by Haskell here).

ColdFusion Specs are governed by the CFML advisory committee.

The head of this committee are comprised of some of the head people from adobe, blue dragon, railo and others in the community.

* Rob Brooks-Bilson - Community / Amkor Technology
* Raymond Camden - Community
* Sean Corfield - Railo, committee chair
* Peter J. Farrell - Community
* Ben Forta - Adobe
* Adam Lehman - Adobe
* Matt Woodward - Open BlueDragon

http://www.opencfml.org

Check out ColdFusion 9, Linux, Debian and Vmware!

If you have been thinking about trying ColdFusion 9 on Linux try it with Debian. Check out Paul's blog at -

http://blog.kukiel.net/2009/07/coldf...nd-vmware.html

I find it surprising that Coldfusion isn't on this list. I've been a web administrator for several large enterprise projects for such entities as the US Federal Courts, Texas State government and many large corporations. You can't beat Coldfusion's system admin, debugging and security logging. It is really easy to set up a redundant clustered server farm.

It's built-in tags are wonderful. We are now integrating Coldfusion web parts in Sharepoint Server 2010 through Coldfusion's built in Sharepoint interface. It is a work horse.

If you haven't tried it you should.

I'm gonna agree with several others here. ColdFusion is by far the best web based language around, particularly since the advent of BD and Railo. It can do anything you want it to with very little effort. It would definately be on my list.

Also on my list:
PHP (I don't use it much but it's still a very important language for web development)
Python (especially as a first language)
C and C++
Assembly (learn it but don't actually use it. Just knowing it can make you a better programmer)

I've seen three free books on Scheme, and they all seem to have advanced topics in them ("intro to computer science" in the title, register machine simulator, etc.). Not many people have voted for Scheme or Lisp in comparison the C/C++/Java/Python/etc. Does anyone here think the free books on Scheme or Lisp are worth reading even if you don't plan on mastering either of them? Anyone think that Scheme/Lisp are good educational languages if not languages to stick with?
Going by what I've read and glanced at, a lot of people seem to think that Lisp/Scheme are good languages for stimulating your mind or something.

Yes, definitely worth reading. I came to appreciation of Lispish languages after writing a lot of parsers - Lisp, essentially, is directly programmed as AST (Abstract Syntax Tree).

Things like dynamic and static scoping and closures are a must to know. One can write OO in Lisp, Ocaml etc. if he/she wishes.

The most important idea, is, I think, that everything (including even constants) can be expressed as a function.

I've done a fair amount of lisp, I've even been paid for it!
lisp has loads of free books and documentation on-line.
it is a wonderful expressive and powerful language.

if C and assembler shorten the distance between keyboard and hardware
lisp shortens the distance between keyboard and brain.

To put it differently - "C" is a machine-independent assembly, so even, say, Java, is guilty by association; Lisp is a computer science language.

I always wanted to learn functional programming, but I never really could figure it out.

BTW, I'm just curious, are functional programming languages really practical for "normal" projects? If so, why are they so uncommon?

Yes, they are.

Regarding "why are they so uncommon?" - the politically incorrect answer is: "because too many people are too dumb for them". I bought a book on Lisp, say, 30 or so years ago; I'm getting functional languages only now. I.e. also belong to the dumb category.

The point is, however, that with orderly learning functional languages should come much more naturally, and they should be the first to be taught.

...

FWIW, OCaml, for example, has reversible debugger (i.e. the one allowing to step back in time from a given breakpoint) as part of its standard package. It's an immensely important feature.

I read a while back that even a couple of video games were written in a variety of Lisp for the Playstation 2. "Jak and Daxter".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Or..._Assembly_Lisp
The Computer Algebra System "Maxima" is written in Lisp. Some parts of a lot of projects, at least, are written using functional languages.
EDIT: I just found this:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/realworld/

This is a little off-topic, but can anyone tell me if this is a really up-to-date and good book to go by:
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/CE.html
It seems like a very nice book. It says "1994-2005", so I would think it's up-to-date. Would it be better to read something else for any reason? I'd like to find a free book that contains a lot of Unix/Linux system calls and Unix/Linux-specific information like that book does, but I wonder if there's a much better book or tutorial somewhere.

Not only this, but also Axiom and Fricas CAS.

Also see http://caml.inria.fr//cgi-bin/hump.en.cgi ->
http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.en...rt=0&browse=85 ->
http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.en.cgi?contrib=88 - just an example.

Also http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.en.cgi?contrib=643 -> http://frama-c.com/ .