Is ColdFusion Dying?

Ben Forta has a nice response to an article in ComputerWorld that lumps ColdFusion in with Cobol and Netware. I think the best part of his response is simply thinking twice about even responding. This article looks as though it was written with little if any knowledge of programming languages. When that occurs you have to wonder if ComputerWorld is printing it because they think it's good journalism or simply that they're fishing for attention.

The problem I have is not the implication that ColdFusion is dying. As a contractor working with it, I've seen demand for it change over the last few years. It seems that companies aren't dropping it so much as avoiding it. And, this is just based on my experience, it seems as though demand is so-so but more so fueled by their being less and less ColdFusion developers in the market. I think some of the house cleaning is occurring because those using it actually expect people to have some skills resembling a software engineer (as they should). I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. It's not dead but I wouldn't call it thriving.

My biggest beef is with this statement

This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages.

Superseded? Superseded in what sense? Number of users that claim to use it? Number of developers who claim to be capable of writing in the language? Number of companies the language's proponents say use the language? No offense to RoR and Python but I fail to see how they've superseded ColdFusion in that sense. Ruby on Rails may do that at some point but isn't there now. For Python it's more that I'm baffled as to how it's being mentioned. I don't think most folks at this point would associate it with web applications. And in the case of Python, I'm not sure I've ever seen even on classified add looking for someone with that skill. I'm sure they're out there but even together they're just not in demand as a job skill as much as ColdFusion. And if they're not that, how is that they've superseded ColdFusion?