Who knows, but consider the following 12 reasons (in no particular order) why the community (and Adobe) should take these kind of concernes actively and seriously:

1) ColdFusion isn’t talked about frequently in trade magazines or enterprise application server related communities other than CF centered sources (when it is, it is usually the same tone as the post linked to here)

2) The number of CF employement opportunities pale in comparison with Java(J2EE), C#(ASP.NET), or VB(ASP.NET).

3) There is not a productivity enhancing integrated development environment on the level of Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans or Zend Studio for CF.

4) To add to a point presented by someone else, There are a plethora of missed opportunities within the Adobe family of products to cross-market CF with Air, Flex, etc. http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/faq/ “For a more productive, higher performing approach to connecting Flex applications to back-end services, you can use BlazeDS, a free, open source Java™ solution.” I didn’t notice any mention of ColdFusion’s value-add to Flex (is there still one?).

5) To follow up on 4, Adobe is actively and heavily marketing Flex and Air to the ColdFusion community and has been doing so for years (for Flex), however I don’t see evidence that Adobe is marketing ColdFusion to the Flex and Air communities with similar verve.

6) There is not a vibrant commercial 3rd party ecosystem surrounding ColdFusion like there is for the .NET and Java communities. I’m talking about vendors like Dundas, Infragistics, etc. Of course the Java based solutions can be used with ColdFusion, but the point is that the 3rd party vendors are a form of unconscious validation of the respective platform. (not to mention every time it’s necessary to delve into the Java world from CF to solve a solution, it lessens the importance of the CF ‘productivity’ layer – productivity severely limited by point 3).

7) Additionally, the open source community surrounding ColdFusion is fairly weak compared to other communities such as Java, PHP, etc. For that matter, even .NET. As a blaring example of this deficiency, Adobe’s own Labs wiki is in PHP, ostensibly because there just isn’t one in CFML that can replace it: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.

8) The secondary CFML vendor New Atlanta enabled the process which resulted in CFML’s biggest public validation of the technology capability moving off the platform to ASP.NET. As Vince said, “…they couldn’t have made the transition from ColdFusion to ASP.NET without BlueDragon”. And don’t let any marketing speak fool you, it is very much likely that any remaining CFML is end of life for MySpace.
References:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu.....T-2.0.aspx
http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a.....ch-Roster/
http://www.jobkabob.com/job/ai.....20355773_0
http://www.devbistro.com/jobs/70492
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?v.....bId=508675

9) CFML language skills aren’t necessarily mutable to other platforms as the tag based syntax and the language’s natural tendency towards procedural flow leaves many developers in unfamiliar territory when it comes to the C descended languages (of which there are many). Not to mention functional, object oriented and other language styles. This dissonance also precludes mutability towards non-web based development.

10) As alluded to earlier, the amount of educational material (books, courses, etc.) is quite limited compared to almost any other platform, language or even framework, such as Ruby (on Rails), C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, Java, J2EE, ActionScript, JavaScript, Struts, Spring, and so forth. From a perception perspective, this lack doesn’t communicate strength in CFML’s staying power.

11) User groups for CF don’t appear to be nearly as vibrant and active as user groups for other development communites (Python, .NET, Java, etc.).

12) Every 6 months or so there’s a new post or article regarding the death of CF that gets propagated around the CF community. The community response is starting to feel like Monty Python’s Black Knight in it’s earnestness;
BLACK KNIGHT: ‘Tis but a scratch.
ARTHUR: A scratch? Your arm’s off!
BLACK KNIGHT: No, it isn’t.
ARTHUR: Well, what’s that, then?
BLACK KNIGHT: I’ve had worse.

I’ll admit that there aren’t usually too many people in the room who’ve used ColdFusion – it’s either the enterprisey (Java/C# or even C++), the cool (Ruby) or the esoteric (Erland, Scheme, Scala), but at least it’s shining a little light onto ColdFusion in places that might not otherwise hear much about it.

And great news John about the book!

Not only is CF not mentioned, but there is no such thing as a “PHP database”, a “.NET database”, or a “Java database”, which this remark implies. Someone obviously doesn’t have facts straight.

“Flex Data Wizards can help you get started quickly with a PHP/.NET/Java database by automatically generating code you can use on your server.”

Now, granted, this is a wiki and the folks adding content may or may not have it thoroughly vetted. Still, to have a sentence like this not mention CF at all, let alone have it at the front of the list, is a bit discouraging.