>>It has been my sad experience that the vast majority of VFP "programmers" lack even the most rudimentary of competent programming skills. Perhaps that is the reason so many are fighting so hard against learning new tools.
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>I kind of agree in that VFP, being so powerful and at the same time fairly simple to pick up, can allow untrained developers to get some sort of solution out there. The same could be said for VB (before .NET).
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>It takes a little bit more technical skill to develop in C, C++ or C# and VB.NET but this shouldn't be confused with good development and design skills.
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>I've been appalled at the type of code that I've seen produced in C++ in the past. I've seen a lot of "look how clever I am - I can get 3 things to happen in one line of code" or "only I'm smart enough to understand this 800 line function that I just wrote" type of code out there.


One of the popular C magazines used to have a regular feature called "Obfuscated C". The challenge was to decipher a block, or even sometimes a line, of C code and describe what it was doing. And this magazine was aimed at serious developers! I have always liked Tamar's description of C as a "write only language."

I'm sure it's possible to write C/C++ code that is as clear as a bell. But the language and the culture that surrounds it seems to encourage dense, hard to understand code. "Look, Ma, no hands!"