>SNIP
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>>And the same goes for Borland Delphi, by the way. Another almost-starter-then-(thank-God!)-non-starter for me. I remember a bunch of Delphi developers thumbing their nose at VFP developers and acting all-around superior with their all-around superior platform (they thought, and maybe rightly so, except that Delphi has kind of disappeared along with the much ballyhooed -- whatever that means -- Kylix... wait, what am I saying... VFP has kind of disappeared, too, along with Foxpro/Unix and Foxpro/Mac!).
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>There are two different things to consider: business and technology. Delphi disappeared because Borland went south as a business. (Icarus syndrome, trying to fly too close to Microsoft?) Technologically and aesthetically it was a terrific development tool. When I was using it I never looked down my nose at VFP -- unlike lots of corporate developers, I knew better -- but it was very cool to work with. The RAD features of VB combined with the low level capabilities of C.

I guess Delphi has gone "public domain" now, and is languishing in the ever-increasing pool of open source programs waiting for some volunteers to pick up bits and pieces of it for further development. This model worked with Linux, has worked pretty well with the likes of Python and few others, but the open source field has now become too crowded to attract enough talented volunteer programmers for everything going open source these days. The only people interested in volunteering their most precious resource -- time -- are ones that need to use some specific features of the open source platform for their specific projects, people with time on their hands and not much else to do, or people that thrive on "community recognition".

Nothing wrong with that, done some of it myself, but open source development in massive scale is pretty much a losing proposition (companies are having a very hard time luring talented programmers with huge paychecks and benefits and stock perks, so how could they attract them with a pat on the back and an "attaboy").