It's a common misconception that CFML stands for "ConFusion Mess(ed)up Language". But it Really means Can't Find My Letter. CFML was designed by Macromedia to solve the problem of pages loading too fast. You see, many old time internet users who now have high speed broadband are getting nostalgic for the days when they could rummage through their old junk to look for a password, secret code, bill, or account number while they waiting for a page to load.
Html only pages on super fast connection with decent hosts just were too fast. By the time you'd find a letter, you hadn't done anything on the webpage for twenty minutes, so your screensaver went on and your account may have logged you off. With "Can't Find My Letter", you have time to browse through your old paper-based system for just the information you need, and be confident that when you get back to your desk the page will still be loading.
Another ingenious invention in website technology is Microplot's A Stupid Page(asp for short). The thing about the information superhighway that stopped it's growth for decades was this feeling that only nerds could use the "information superhighway", that you had to know what you were doing to make a webpage.
Well, when you see asp at the end of a page you can be pretty certain that the individual or business is no smarter than you are, and that inferiority complex just goes away.
When you ask a asp page a question (those snooty browsers and servers usually call it a "query") ASP pages don't always know the answer right away. In fact, they often take so long to respond that not even firefox has the patience to put up with that nonsense. You know if your broswer, or any other piece of freeware, gets fed up with waiting, that's gotta means something.
Sometimes ASP pages claim to be "active". Well, they're not very active in answering your questions on the internet. Maybe they place sports or something. Maybe that slimy snake is a musclehead after all.
Php is a funny little language. The first p and the last p both stand for different things, but they are acronyms of the same letters.
PHP homeboy, PHP
At first, if you know that the old PHP was please have patience, you might think they were saying please have patience twice. But in my experience, php pages usually aren't very slow, and they can actually be fast compared to all the other dynamic junky stupid pages out there.
That's because they don't have a lot of content in them, as they aren't normally made by large corporations but rather by individuals.
That's where the second php comes into play "Poor (and) Hungry Programmer". PHP is a popular programming language for blogs and simple form processing, as it's not proprietary and can be hosted cheaply. The cheap hosting is partly due to the fact that php doesn't cause many security risks because it doesn't really do all that much.
So when you see a php page that looks incomplete, think to yourself:
Please have patience Homeboy, I'm a Poor hungry programmer
Pappa Has a Paaaage, yeah Pappa Has a web Paage.
For those older programmers here who are getting nostalgic back to the days when Sun Microsystems was a company that people actually heard of, we'll cover JSP.
JSP, like everything else Sun Microsofygus™ makes, is a piece of freeware. Sun (not to be confused with the British Tabloid of the same name) makes their money from programmers who take a multiple choice test to prove they can read and understand the documentation attached to the freeware.
Now, the problem with JSP is you don't know if you come across one of them pages. The Jawa Secret Police don't leave any trace of where they been, but that doesn't really show what JSP stands for. Some people say, as in all the technology that allow you to use Server Side Includes, the P at the end of JSP really stands for Purgatory, meaning the wait you endure when you try and load a JSP page to find out whether the page is good or evil.
Well, some people think I died in ... actually, I've just been sitting here with my laptop at Highgate Cemetary, waiting for a JSP page to load. Just Sit Patiently, they tell me.
OPP isn't a web programming language as far as I'm aware. Rather, it's a rap song that goes something like "You down with OPP, yeah you know me."
The lyrics are degrading, degenerate, nonsense meant for decadent bourgoisie, but the rhythm is something you can move to while you wait for all this dynamic garbage to load.
Despite the subliminal messages, I found myself hopping to it in the nineteen nineties when someone idiotic suburban teenagers were blasting Radio 1 on old boomboxes at my gravesite.
"Old Marx" wasn't turning in his grave, he was groooooving!
So called dynamic internet languages are just like so called dynamic sales reps. They're skinny, bubbly, like to sport a silly grin on their silly little (inter)face, make a lot of noise and then take forever to get things done.
Karl Marx - 6 Oct 2006 - Highgate Cemetary
P.S. (or should that be SP?) - that JSP page has finally loaded! Unfortunately, the site is no longer available. It is now redirecting me somewhere else entirely.