>John,
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>Good points, but eventually just a whimper in front of the steamroller of progress.
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>As I drive around in my new, fancy Toyota, I still often think fondly of my first VW bug (drop the engine, change the clutch, attach the engine and drive away, all with a few simple tools and in under 45 minutes) or my first Fiat 600 (couldn't break it, hard as I tried). Talk about elegance in simplicity. Rough ride, but mechanically comprehensible and hence "field-fixable". Not so with my new Toyota.
>
>Same can be said about my old Fox DOS and Windows 2.6 apps. They were simple, and they were "field-fixable" (because of the table-driven nature of almost everything). And they were fast -- certainly faster than my Fortran 77 programs running on CDC Cyber 9600 supermainframe. And today, when I run the old Fox apps on the most current hardware, those programs MOVE at the speed of thought -- easily beating similar VFP apps, speedwise.
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>To me, it is mainly marketing that is constantly driving things towards more and more complex. And as complexity rises, so do potential bugs, logarithmically (base 10 <g> ).
>
>Do I like my Toyota? Absolutely. Would I trade it to a Fiat 600? Certainly not. But if car manufacturers had stopped research and development in 1965, we would all be happily driving these little simple mechanical wonders today, and getting much, much better gas mileage to boot (and, granted, much worse emissions and largely missing safety features beyond mechanical breaks).
>
>If MS built software as well as Toyota (or Honda or Nissan or...) builds cars, the cushy user-interface-interior of the new software, such as .NET, would be much more palatable than it has been until recently. As it is, it seems to me that when MS moves forward with whatever new software they are pushing at any given time, they end up losing many of the great things they had going before they decided to wipe the slate clean and start over with the latest and the greatest software design architecture. VFP's data handling comes to mind: .NET is just now starting to catch up with it, after a HUGE development effort and some 6-odd years in the market.
>
>To me, the move to .NET was kind of like buying a brand new, heavily hyped and fancy car sight unseen, only to eventually find out that it is missing instrumentation! I did not realize how woefully inadequate and primitive data handling in .NET 1.0 was until I got my hands dirty with it. By then it was too late -- I had already bought the package, and I was now reduced to staring at the blank space where instrumentation (data) was supposed to be. (To see how fast I was going, I had to wire my own speedometer to the front wheels. To see how hot the coolant was, I had to dip my finger into the radiator... You get the picture)
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>However (and isn't there always one), trying to slow down the software generational cycle is kind of like trying to slow down the spinning of the Earth. Or, as was the case in the 1800's, trying to destroy the bigger and better "Spinning Jenny" -machines in textile factories (see: "Luddites"). In our software world today, it translates to this: Unless you have clients that are willing to work with the ancient, blocky user interface of something like Fox DOS (or Fox UNIX) systems, you as a developer have to move on, no matter how "sufficient" and how amazingly fast the old systems are. Ditto with VFP's now quickly aging UI compared to Vista and whatever the heck comes after that. At least I have found that my clients expect their software to be within 0-2 generations of the latest UI generation. Consequently, I have started moving on, however reluctantly.
>
>If software development follows the same growth path as industrial revolution, we should end up with more and more "comfortable" and flashy software that is faster and faster to develop in large scale and also eventually much "safer" (and hopefully more and more reliable, as well). And that, IMHO, is not a bad thing, overall. It just means that in order to stay alive, we have to constantly keep adjusting to our ever-changing environment. What a concept!

Very nice post :)
I agree that in our game goal posts are constantly moving;
but in my kind of situation I prefer (and have) to be - goalkeeper. I am absolutely happy when our frontmen score (wearing latest NET technology shoes), but I got my own goal to defend. When (NET datahandling) victory is secured I will move myself and my goalpost ahead, to catch up again with frontmen ;)






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>Pertti
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>>I have found myself struggling over the years, as I suspect we all have done if we're pushing things, to keep my latest computer system from imminent collapse. I don't mean against viruses, worms and other hacks - simply to keep the operating system and major applications running for at least one whole day.
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>>In every era the most useful things often haven't worked. Office 4 introduced embedded OLE objects - they just didn't work. Windows prior to 2000 used to leak memory all day until you had to reboot and reclaim it. The last couple of iterations of Word and Excel have been impressive at crash recovery - but they do lock up regularly. I drive Excel from VFP all the time and I scarcely get a session in without losing the object or COM won't start it, or whatever. Each version of Windows has been better than the one before, but it still blanks me a couple of times a week. (Don't chip in with something here about Linux ... I know it would be the same.)
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>>In all of this, one application stands out and that is Visual FoxPro. When all apps are unresponsive, one isn't. That's VFP. VFP tables are vulnerable to power outages (or pressing restart deliberately), but designing a recovery tool is not hard and if (rarely) my app needs to use mine, it's back in seconds.
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>>I love moving to newer technology but I can also see when older things outperform their replacements. I know we'll look back at VFP when we've bowed to the tide of progress (as we all will) and, when poised to smash a hammer through our virtual keyboards, yearn for the little application that never fell over.
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>>Back when I've switched to Vista ...
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>>John Burton