Well, I for one find it difficult to learn a new language. It requires a major investment, especially in time, and perhaps money too. There is a need to learn lots of new concepts, different ways of doing things. I am starting to feel old, and "like butter spread over too much bread" (Tolkien).

It would be very pleasant to be able to continue working with VFP, but it seems this can't be. (Or perhaps I can keep busy in my old days, maintaining legacy applications, and doing some other work such as teaching computer networks or translations, and leave the new languages for younger people!)

It has been clear for quite a while that I should learn some new languages, or several. Years ago, I was thinking about Delphi, later about Visual Basic. Interestingly, both of these have been discontinued earlier than Visual FoxPro.

But the point is still valid, it is quite necessary to learn new tools. Perhaps I do manage to take some time to learn something new, now that I no longer work permanently at Bata/Bolivia (and teaching at the Cisco Academy doesn't take too much time).

But I wonder what would be a good choice. .NET, I think, is a little too much oriented towards Windows (VFP even more so, of course). Java perhaps, that's quite multiplatform. Sure, I know .NET will "in theory" also work in different platforms. No need to repeat that.

Over here, they talk a lot about PHP and Perl. Might be interesting options, too, but I have almost no idea what it is all about.

>AFAIK, they won't add any new functionality other than offering the possibility of running in .NET. They may add a couple of years to the life of VFP applications, but that won't prevent VFP from being obsolete.
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>I'm still amazed to see developers so attached to a given tool that they won't even try to learn/use anything else. It's a little bit like a construction worker who is the master of the hammer. Everything look like a nail to him and he won't let go of his hammer for nothing. Sometime a screwdriver may be a better option to work with a screw.
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>If you want your application to run in .NET, why don't you use a real .NET language?