Perry, you may be right that the younger developers are ok with it but that doesn't address Jim's point that the dev tool is much more complex than it probably needs to be. The fact that one can learn it is not vindication that it is the best way to do it.

In respect of being married to a particular tool - everyone who spends a considerable amount of time to become proficient with a development tool will become emotionally married to it to one degree or another. This is human nature. Let the average 18 year old .Net programmer come back to us in 10 years time when DevToolX is released and see what they say about their tool.

VFP has allowed us to build not one but two succesfull businesses. We have managed to out-program and out-develop all our competitors who jumped from one new dev tool to another looking for an edge. We stuck with xBase / VFP and built more applications and websites in less time than any of our competitors, and are still doing that even today against competitors much larger than ourselves.

The ability to develop an app, with a database, and compile it into an exe and bundle it with 3 or 4 megs of dll files is simply fantastic. I really appreciate what the VFP team have given us.


>But I see what's going on in my own environment today. One thing I'm doing is working on maintenance of a VFP app. It's being replaced by a Java version. It's at the point where the maintenance of the VFP app is slowing down so I'm working more with the Java team.
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>There are a couple things I'm seeing. The first thing confirms something I read, maybe here, several years ago about trying to train new folk in VFP. The original author was saying he was having great difficulty. He was developing your typical day-to-day business app. But everyone he was interviewing was interested on working on the Next Big Software Program.
>Where I'm at has lost a couple top programmers for the same reason.
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>Second, the people doing VFP are, on the average substantially older then the rest of IT. And the younger people I work with don't share your views at all. At lunch today I mentioned the bru ha-ha over this announcement.
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>The general consensus was that you should never be married to the software tool. The next generation of software developers has grown up with this current environment and don't have any problem with it. And bottom line, they are more then happy to push you and I out of the way.
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