>I contacted the Vancouver DevDays InterDev speaker who had some rude comments regarding VFP and developers using VFP. He said he wouldn't mind if I posted his e-mail reply to me, so here it is:
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>---Start of message---
>Well, I usually get in trouble for teasing the FoxPro programmers, so let me say up front - FoxPro is a perfectly viable language, and good for developing applications in the very latest object-oriented, client/server based style. No two ways about it, Microsoft has done a good job of keeping FoxPro up to date.
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>The problem with FoxPro is that it is a bit of a lost language. There's nothing in FoxPro that couldn't be done in Visual Basic, and Visual Basic is more popular by a couple of orders of magnitude. To top it off, FoxPro isn't being treated very nicely by Microsoft. Case in point - the keynote speech for Developer Days. Bill Gates never mentioned FoxPro, never said the word. He mentioned and demonstrated every other feature of Visual Studio, but not FoxPro.
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>On the occasions where I've been at Microsoft and had a chance to talk to them about it, they have freely admitted that they would discontinue FoxPro if they could. But there is a small group of FoxPro programmers - some would call them militant, that have kept the language alive.
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>Today, if you're an independent programmer looking for contract work, you'll have a tough time convincing a client to let your write the application in FoxPro - in Visual Basic, no problem, but people believe that FoxPro is out of date. That isn't true at all, as you likely know, but in the end, the client is always right - right? What is true is that FoxPro is out of favor, and that makes the viability of language in perpetual risk.
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>Now that's not to say that FoxPro is going to disappear over night - heck, many products have hovered at the level of near non-existence for years. Just because it isn't popular, doesn't mean it isn't good.
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>Hope that clarifies the point.
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>---End of message---
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>I, of course, pointed out that VFP is much more OOP (and, therefore, more maintainable, etc.) than VB, and VFP has a faster data engine. I also voiced my opinion about worrying about the possible death of VFP. If it happens, I'll have a ton of work maintaining/enhancing existing code, and if I need to learn another language, I will. But this guy obviously doesn't believe VFP is weak. I think he needs to pick a different situation to make his jokes though. Some or all people in the audience would have been affected by his rude comments regarding VFP.

Fox is still viable, already for 10 years (huge incomparable period in PC world) and for me, as Fox developer, it's enough to know. I mean, as long as MS keeps VFP as part of development tools releasing new versions, it's up to me to convince a client, actually up to my skills. I have couple applications upgraded from VB to VFP (and clients were happy), one of such projects is under development.