Hi John,

>>> VFP is a great product but one that doesn't sell well to developers, and not only because of Microsoft's marketing or lack thereof, but because it's very different from anything else out there...
>
>The main "difference" is FP's tight coupling of language with data. How long do you think it will be before this is seen as a fantastic innovation in dotNET or some other popular tool? ;-)

Fantastic or not this was the going model in the early 90's when XBase was the language and database tool of choice. XBase died out - it's all but gone with Fox the last of a whole heap of products that are now nothing but historic side notes.

It wasn't that tools weren't capable of producing the applications of the day. It was OO paradigms and developers moving away from a hodgepodge of techologies.

I personally like XBase and always have, but it is a very inconsistent set of language constructs. And XBase doesn't fit well with strongly typed languages which may be the main reason why the model has gone away.

However, even in that light I know that a very large number of current developers have worked with XBase at some point in time - you hear very few lamenting that they wish they had it back...

I would root for more XBase like features in other languages, but frankly I don't buy the talk of limitations or ease of use advantages of an XBase language... we've had this discussion before. <g>