I worked at a major university that used ColdFusion. They had one guy furiously writing all these websites that were total one-offs. They didn't use source control. Every project was a copy of his original. If there was a bug, he had to update dozens of projects instead of maintaining common source across those dozens of sites. He was totally insane and making bank.
I was active in the ColdFusion/CFML community for a long time, and still run some production code in it. It certainly isn't popular, but just carries on quietly, powering a lot of internal applications you'll never hear about. Many run the open source version of it (Lucee).
Indeed it does. I maintain one such application while an in-progress rewrite develops. Gotta say, it's not been that bad and the Lucee docs have served me well, but for whatever reason I tend to be pleased/impressed by all kinds of tech, even when popular opinion is negative about it.
With how deeply embedded cold fusion was in many gigantic corporations I've worked with, I would not be surprised if it stays alive for decades to come because nobody ever can port off of it.
Don't remember the full context, but I heard a few years ago from Adobe that they could never sell another license to the private sector and government licenses would be self-sustaining.
Apparently some here are quite active with it:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46211559
Also longtime internet celebrity and occasional HN poster Pud built the wildly successful Distrokid service with it.
Same with Dreamweaver, many aren't aware it is still around.
The company which bought my last startup, their main product (Trade Promotion Management tool) was in CF.
Definitely a little talked about language, but it does get some use.
Lucee took over and is still active (ish).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion
What surprised me is that when I went to look at the Wikipedia page for CF, apparently its latest release was this year! I haven’t heard anybody mention it in a very long time.