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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

> it has a fully script-based syntax now

What does this mean? This being a revelation for a web tech solution strikes me as strange. I saw a tiny bit of CF like 25 years ago and perhaps mistakenly thought it did this back then.

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It used by be a markup language like:

  <cfif blah="something is true">do this<cfelse>do that</cfif>

But now it has its own scripting language like:

  <cfscript>
  // scripty stuff
  </cfscript>

At least, that is how it used to be :)

Ahh. Yeah. Well that sparks a memory of why I quickly went another direction after looking at it back then when I was learning web dev lol. Tbf a lot of people were, probably still are, using PHP and JavaScript way back then too. It just made sense for me to do some MVC style separation long before I found out there was an acronym for it.

This style is often how I want to write my view layer. In fact, when I get my model layer, app logic layer, and view layer done well, it's usually how my view templates will look more or less, whether the remaining data anchors, transformation functions, and control flow are out-of-band script or in-band tags.

And then there's stuff like XSLT...

There has to be some code in the view but I tend to just like to do pass it in a 'print ready' format so there's nothing really going on in the view except the presentation part. An if statement is often an indicator I'm doing too much in the view. Not always ofc, sometimes it makes sense to see if the count is 1 or >1 so you can plural a word, stuff like that is OK in the view. These are just my personal heuristics of course

cfscript has been part of ColdFusion since 1998. It has expanded over time to include more functionality, but it has been there.

Also the markup-based functionality hasn't gone anywhere.

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