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You can write real programs in CFML, that makes it a real programming language. Having said that, CFML has taken some heat for not looking like traditional programming languages (it is primarily tag based, not script based). There are several important points to keep in mind here: 1) CFML was designed to mimic HTML because it is HTML (and its inherent simplicity) that made the Web successful; rather than retrofitting existing languages to be Web centric (think Perl) CFML was built from the ground up for this space. 2) ColdFusion does indeed support scripting for programmatic tasks (flow control, conditional processing, etc.) via <CFSCRIPT> and more recently server-side ActionScript. 3) CFML is a very powerful programming language and is made up of about 100 tags and over 200 functions that perform all common programmatic operations and many not so common ones too (LDAP interaction, XML abstractions, COM and CORBA support, graphing and full text searching, and more). 4) It is somewhat ironic that for 5 years CFML was criticized for being tag based, and then comes ASP.NET featuring tag abstractions, and JSP which is essentially tag wrappers around Java code, and even XML which is nothing more than tag based data sharing. Looks like CFML had it right all along.
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