When comparing CFML vs Racket, the Slant community recommends Racket for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Racket is ranked 17th while CFML is ranked 73rd. The most important reason people chose Racket is:
Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Rapid application development
Get a web app up and running fast with stuff built right in to CFML! Frameworks make it even faster but lengthen the learning curve.
Pro Easily query a database
Newcomers can use an html-like syntax to query a database. Advanced developers can use a scripted syntax to execute stored procedures.
Pro Multiple engine implementations available
There are multiple engine implementations available including Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee, New Atlanta BlueDragon, Railo, and Open BlueDragon among others.
Pro Quick document and image manupulation
ColdFusion can quickly interact with PDFs , Spreadsheets to read/manipulate the data. There are a lot of built in functions to manipulate images quickly.
Pro Realm of Racket is an excellent entry-level guidebook
Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.
Pro Racket was designed to teach functional programming from the start
Racket is based on Scheme (LISP Family) and is very similar to Clojure. So there are a ton of (). The reason it is easier to learn is that it is not trying to be "Pure" if there is even such a thing in terms of Functional Programming. The great thing about Racket is it has everything included. You get DrRacket for developing programs. You want to add a picture to your software you can insert pictures. If you want to add libraries just open the package manager. The Syntax is an opinion but it really does feel easier to see what is happening since everything is in brackets)
Racket is a really a Programming Language for making Programming Languages. So there are smaller syntax Racket called Student Racket which makes things easier to pick up.
Pro Free resources to Learn
Includes several free online books and great documentation.
Pro Great RPEL IDEA included Dr. Racket
Pro Active community
Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed.
Pro Syntax fits to functional programming
Although syntax is different from that of mainstream languages, S-expressions are a perfect match to functional programming.
Pro Subtly encourages functional programming
Racket makes it inconvenient to pursue imperative habits while encouraging functional programming by Lisps's syntax. For example, the syntax for defining a function is almost the exact same as defining a variable. In addition, Racket has a strong set of higher-order functions built in to the language.
Pro Easily embeddable
Racket is famously embedded in the game engine underlying Naughty Dog's Uncharted and The Last of Us games, because it proved to be so easy to embed.