Peter,

>In another recent post here (Re: North Americans - waste 60 seconds of your time Thread #1210969 Message #1211598) I bring to the attention the fact that the VFP language is not approved by an independent committee and that there are no (longer) competitors that implement this language in a development product also. I guess what's currently happening demonstrates that it is important to stick to a language that is popular AND that is public domain AND that is implemented in development products by MORE competitors. And it is likely even more important for developers and companies in 'developing' countries.

Kind of like Lingua Franca, no? Not a bad idea -- it just needs to come from the "roots up" to make the "natural selection", so that it doesn't end up like Esperando, which was supposed to be the universal language (and for good reasons, too), but it didn't go anywhere because the language users (us little guys) pretty much rejected it.

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>VB.NET is not such a product. I assume the same is true for C#.NET. I know they compile to IL, but that's another issue. It is MS that determines which functions make it to the language and which don't. As a consequence, whenever MS decides to stop (see also J#), its users are in trouble, because there's no other same-procedures ship to jump on.

I would imagine that MS listens to the users' wishes pretty closely. They sure did during VFP development. Of course, in the end, it is "them" and not "us" that make the decisions as to what gets included and what doesn't. What I'm thinking about is that if a language is really, really useful to a lot of people, it will somehow survive and thrive in some form or another. eTecnologia and a few other companies are trying to do just that.


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>You're talking about evolution. I think that idiosyncratic programming languages will be abandoned and the surviving languages will be publicly/comittee agreed upon constructs. And VFP is idiosyncratic. Decision makers in companies do not want to be hijacked by MS. Probably that's the REAL reason for its diminishing.
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>The only 'life jacket' might be an ultimate attempt to extract those portions of the language that are good enough for approval by a committee and a request to IT corporations to create development tools that implement this language.

I can imagine the meetings of that committee <g>, which is not to say that it wouldn't be a good and even workable idea, as long as the discussions don't get too "academic" and stay close to the needs at the grassroots. Organizing and keeping something like this going is pretty hard, I would imagine, but some of the open source efforts have actually done pretty well, Python being one of them. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.


Pertti