Tangent: Much like PHP, "modern" CF isn't actually that bad to work with these days. In particular the superset-of-html syntax has been superseded for pure logic by "CFScript" which is just an ECMAScript dialect.

There's even a package manager, test harness, etc. And of course it's JVM hosted so it's fairly easy to use Java stuff (stdlib of otherwise) if what you need doesn't exist in CF.