>>Maybe I'm off on a rant but that really bothered me. It's bad enough that the Fox community is in decline and that we'll never again have an 1800 attendee conference but are we dinosaurs? Sure, some of us are. A friend of mine recently nicknamed me "The Lion in Winter". I like that because it means that when the thaw comes I'll come roaring out. Maybe. What's our average age now? 50 or so? Can some of us come roaring out and prove we're still the best doggone developers out there? I hope so.
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>Using FoxPro? Those who do will by and large only be impressing a dwindling circle of friends and admirers. Most everyone else will react the same way those folks at the conference yesterday did. If they even know FoxPro is still alive it isn't anything they want or need now.

Well, ya know, Mike, I see a lot of that. We have a significant amount of Foxers showing other Fox beholden how cool they are with Fox still to this day. We have another group who actually have a clue about .Net and the future of development but don't openly share that knowledge and try to make a buck on the poor, uninformed masses of existing Fox developers. I reject both camps.

I thought of a better analogy to how I felt yesterday. I was the grizzled Cro Magnon hunter in the hunt planning meeting of the newer Homo Sapiens. While I was respected as an accomplished elder I wasn't expected to keep up with the new hunting techniques of the Sapiens. They would slay the mastadon more quickly and efficiently than they thought I could and that, even if I caught up with them, I couldn't be expected to learn the new techniques and couldn't fully adapt.

>Why did the dinosaurs become extinct? Probably no one knows for sure but certainly one possibility is it was the same way most extinct species did: they failed to adapt.

Exactly. I also reject the assumption that we can't adapt. We need to stop being afraid of the tools and being afraid to start again; paradigm shifts are part of our industry. Once we grasp the tools and environment, all of our rich experience in problem-solving will come back to serve us.

People were surprised to see me at that mini-Con yesterday. It's not a feeling I wish to repeat. I don't want to rest on my laurels in the Fox world. I, no *we*, can take our experience and conquer this new world. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I'll be speaking again by 2010. On .Net or SQL or something. I climbed one mountain; I can climb another. You can, too.

>On the lighter side, or should I say the far side, my favorite theory about the dinosaurs was Gary Larson's in a classic Far Side cartoon. A bunch of dinosaurs are standing around smoking cigarettes (LOL).

I remember that. The caption was "The REAL reason the dinosaurs died out".