Interesting comment; I believe if you are going to implicate Cold Fusion, you also need to rope in PHP.<p>My first exposure to web programming was HTMLScript at my university in the mid 90s (now called MivaScript and is the language used to build the MivaMerchant product). Soon after, I switched to PHP 3, but I found that I preferred Miva.<p>I have not touched Miva in years after spending some time as a freelancer in the late 90s, but because it is tied to a successful niche e-commerce platform, the language survives. It is very similar to Cold Fusion minus the enterprise level database support.<p>I worked with CF for a time in the late 90s&#x2F;00s (when it was still a product of Allaire) along side of ASP (pre .net), and I actually preferred it to both ASP and PHP - mainly because the mixing of mark up and DSL blocks seemed really unscalable.<p>PHP may have been seen as an evolution in web programming since it abstracted the mixing of logic and presentation a bit more than Miva or CF, but in retrospect I believe PHP was not an improvement. It made general web programming  easier, but software maintenance is easier in languages like CF and Miva that embrace embedded mark up&#x2F;logic.<p>The frameworks provided by Ruby, Python, Perl, and even TCL  (among others) seem to have reached a point where only blurring the lines between client and server seem like the only logical paradigm change - and that&#x27;s not to say it&#x27;s an improvement.