Interesting question and interesting answers.

I'm in the positin of developing my own apps at home in VFP but the team that I'm in charge of here uses Delphi. I'm currently putting a case for conversion to VFP for the reasons I'll state here.

VFP is a good solid development environment that handles data like it was an arm or a leg, just an extention of the VFP body - This cannot ever be underrated - and fast.

It is , in my opinion, the only 4GL on the market worth the mention. Users like Access but the very slow data access speed coupled with the mangled code we get from managers and others in the organisation who think they can program and pass on to us to "finish up quickly - after all, they programed this over the weekend, surely it should take you profesionals just an hour or two to complete it?".

VFP is advanced enough to keep the management managing and the programmers programming. It has a very nice and simply oops implementation and it does everything you will ever need it to do, and in more ways than one.

but the basic killer, the one big thing that this has over all other languages (taken, of course, with the notes above), is the pure "out the door" ability for developing applications in house.

I contend that a person with reasonable proficiency (not a guru, just proficient) in VFP can pump out more bug free apps in a six month period than a similarly proficient person in almost any other language you could name.

Sure Delphi and C++ can give much tighter code that may run faster (though data access may balance that out) - so can developing in machine code or even binary, but what VFP can give is PRODUCTION! THROUGHPUT! PROFIT!

Gotta have features that allow VFP to be seriously considered are:

1. Ability to access other databases in a multi-tier development environment.

2. Object oriented environment

3. Easy to program and learn.

4. Allows full gui development.

There are probably more, but I've got work to do.

Thanks for the great discussion

Steve Peacocke

>I am curious. There has been a lot of discussion here on UT regarding MS and what they are doing with VFP. I get the feeling that there are different foci as to what VFP is.
>
>So, I would like to ask these question.
>
>What is VFP to you? How would you categorize it?
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>What would you say are your primary reasons for using the product? What does it do best?
>
>Thanks for your indulgence.