My personal favorites (I don't necessarily agree with the arguments, but I love the use of language :->):

• Erlang: The Mary Celeste of programming ships, it appeared out of nowhere, nobody really knows what it does or what it’s good for, and nobody knows whats happening to it, or where it is going.
• Lisp? I think Lisp is sort of like a hydrofoil: everyone’s first reaction is “How does THAT work??”
• OR Lisp is a kayak. Fun, not usually used for big projects, and sometimes it just feels upside down.
• Ruby on Rails (to clarify) is one of those fab little peddle boats that go on lakes etc - effortless to use, easy to manouvre, bells and whistles and everyone goes awwww… but as soon as you get out into open water you’re doomed. Peddling hapelessly against the tide until the end of time.
• Haskell would be an alien UFO that’s crash-landed in the middle of the desert, which no-one understands at first. In fact it is made of strange materials and doesn’t look right at all.
• Visual Basic is a freightliner carrying a unicycle.

So, what kind of boat IS ColdFusion?

In short, Mingle (their app) is being sold to "conservative enterprise clients" and the positioning is "look - it's running on Java - so it is enterprise".

Reminds me of a language that I know and love, but it will definitely be interesting to see how the trend of differentiating languages from platform will play out for CF.