>VFP has evolved over 20 years as a complete development environment, of which the data centric pieces are an important part. The other pieces are important, also, and the benefits of a dynamic language are a core benefit (as has been pointed out by MS to us when the VFP team was asked about putting VFP under the CLR in the first place). That's what will always be missing (at least it appears) from VB.Net and C#, which is why both of those languages will never be as productive as VFP, even with data centric features added. So it's not that Python in whatever version has datacentric capabilities compared to VFP: it's that IronPython, a .Net language, will in its 1.0 version, offer dynamic language capabilties similar to VFP, but not available in VB.Net and C#, both at runtime and in the IDE.
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>I'm not complaining, because Python in fact has some language features, like method-object passing, that would be handy to have in development, and IronPython effectively solves the problem of where VFP developers can go without changing to a different programming paradigm. It's just that using the knowledge of how to do it (move VFP to .Net) that JimH has developed, and then proceeding to take over the mass developer market in .Net, would be sweet justice for all the slights from the rest of the MS over the years, imagined and real. :)
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Hi Hank,

Your answer together with the ability you seem to have to move between the VFP, .NET, and Python worlds, really caught my attention. I don't want to have a 100% closed mind toward learning a new development language and environment (meaning .NET) but I also don't want to take several steps back in order to take one step forward. What I mean is that in order to gain the ability to easily produce internet apps I am not willing to: 1) Give up a data-centric functionality (totally crucial), and 2) Give up macros, if that is what you mean by "dynamic language capabilties".

Since nobody can argue about the value of easily building data-centric applications, I want to emphasize that macros are important too. They are not mission critical, but they are very useful. For example, with macros you can build SELECT statements on the fly in a few lines of code and do other things at runtime that give you a lot of flexibility. I hope that Microsoft remembers that not everybody is a corporate developer in the Fortune 500 (too bad) where controlling what developers do may be useful :)

Thanks for bringing this up.

Alex


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>>There are many features missing in IronPython that exist in VFP, VB, and C#. :) But of course if you do find useful data-centric functionality there compared to VFP development, post your results on your blog, here, etc.