>"But unfortunately, I also think that those languages, for whatever reasons, never got accepted as mainstream programming languages, largely. They lacked some capabilities that programmers, generally speaking, want."

>The market for VFP is extremely small. Dbase and Clipper are basically non-existent. Programmers have moved on and not looked back. I know you've mentioned problems you've had trying to port your apps over to dotnet. But many, many others have left VFP programming and not looked back.

As many, many programmers left programming on the whole. Certainly a lot of people left the IT after the internet hype. Lets face it. Programming is not an easy job. Working with complex data in general is not for the faint hearted. I know that if I ever stop programming, I probably would do something totally different outside of the IT world.

You're here talking about points that in general do not have anything to do with the qualities of the VFP programming language. There are quite a few technical aspects in VFP that are far superiour to .NET and they all have to do with beeing a dynamic language and beeing data centric.

Programming a language like VFP requires a steep learning curve and the rich language is quite hard to learn as it is at a higher level (4GL, rather than 3GL). .NET is much more like convential programming languages like C and Pacal, where the number of commands are limited and almost universal, and the runtime compiler checks. Typically those languages are teached at university as they are not difficult to grasp and its priciples have been there for decades. Doing data is obscured to SQL programming on SQL based backeds.

As a result VFP talent is difficult to find, and the constant rumours and fabricated fact about its death have not been helping either. The lack of marketing at MS of course one thing that has it forced into obscurity. We (the company I work for) have faced the problem of getting good VFP talent, but we finally ended up getting someone very smart with limited VB experience but with great enthousiasm, caring for the job. We send him off to steven black for training and he certainly the best thing we did last year. Dispite this success, I kow that companies are struggling to get good VFP talent and therefore are looking into alternatives. You can't blame them.


>I think there are some things in VFP that are better. But on the whole, dotnet is a better language.

.NETs OO languange and integration with the OS is far better than VFP, sure.. The 'potential' pool of programmers is larger. ASP.NET (as I hear) is a better choice. But its data integration still is about non-existant. Its dynamical aspects are very poor (using reflection for about anything).

If you look at the other side of the coin. The CRM solutions where about everything is data driven, you'll see how much you've been working in isolation. This really is the future. If you look at how these huge enteprise level packages (SAP, BAAN, NAVISION, etc) are implemented and how they do data, you soon come to the conclusion that .NET only has limited reach indeed convicted to the 3GL solutions. MS has aquired 4GL technology (Navision), but the .NET team apparantly did not grasp the concept yet. If they succeed in combining those you'll have a real winner. The problem with the CRM/ERP languanges is that they all are propietary and fairly limited to solving the most frequent problems (as oposed to VFP where you always have 4 or 5 way to do things).

A problem of VFP is it is somewhat in the middle. More data centric and problem solving oriented than .NET, but lacking the features of CRM/ERP solutions. Very complex data centric solutions are far better done in ERP/CRM, even though VFP is far better capable of doing that than the .NET solutions.

Back to the language argument about .NET vs VFP, you have to beg the question: Does this matter from a technical point of view. I beg to differ. I probably can develop the same 'real world' application in VFP in half the time any .NET programmer can do if data is involved. So what is in it for the client ???

>Personally, I'd rather not be coding for my livelyhood in 10 yrs. But I'd like to continue for the shortterm since it pays the bills nicely. My opportunities are far, far, far, far greater in the dotnet world.

Ahhh, Job security. Sure, but this does not have anything to do with the .NET language... And what you mean with opportunities. In most cases a programmer ends up beeing a programmer. Whether it is a VFP programmer or a .NET programmer or java programmer. It still remains the same. If you're talking about opportunities, I would think of beeing an IT manager or software architect, etc. I don't think the programming language does plays any significant role in here.

Walter,