>The significant differences between what you say you are doing and what eT hopes to achieve is "scope" (eT is far more ambitious than Web2/AJAX- what about Silverlight?) and the dreaded "VFP" on which you are focused.

Let's get one thing straight. I am not focused on VFP and haven't been for some time. I'm not actually interested in what eT is doing either. So, I am not wittingly gunning for VFP or eT in any way. My main temptation into making the cardinal sin of actually posting (as opposed to lurking) on this board was the claim that .NET as a platform was not mature.

>(eT is far more ambitious than Web2/AJAX- what about Silverlight?)

I couldn't say whether eT is more ambitious than Web2/AJAX and frankly, to me, it matters not. From my perspective, I can personally gain much from Web2/AJAX technologies because this kind of development is plentifull and relevent in today's world. I fell foul of being a "died in the wool" VFP developer and trying to find work with that skill-set on my CV. My reality is that quite some time ago, the Fox job market dried up here despite there being countless jobs for other MS and non-MS technologies. So, using tools like .NET, Java, PHP, Javascript, CSS make total sense. OTOH, if I had a huge VFP system or vertical package developed in VFP, then I would be watching eT very closely indeed.

>IMHO, VFP is an added bonus with the eT system because I have plenty of valuable existing code but it is irrelevant to the abstraction and re-compilation power that delivers far more benefits than those offered by your "cool" HTML system.

I couldn't really comment on what benefits eT will offer you but what I can say that I am building a system right now with NOLOH that works and that I can touch and feel. For my requirements, I can assure you that NOLOH delivers me far more benefits than eT could.

>I'd also observe that while it is easy to call VFP dead, I'd expect there is a lot more commercially available expertise than there is for something like NOLOH.

Do you think so? How many PHP developers are there in the world? I don't know the answer to that question but I can guarantee that there are plenty more PHP developers than there ever were VFP developers, even at VFP's peak. NOLOH is a superset of PHP. I liken it to using VFP with Codemine/FoxExpress/MereMortals etc. Q.E.D.

>Surely we can agree that these sorts of tools create their own demand as I'm sure NOLOH will do if its beta continues to go well and it meets its milestones. Not sure how else I can explain.

There is nothing to disagree with here.

>While we're on the topic of language morbidity: people may also like to consider that (without getting tied up in what has happened since) the Pascal language was sidelined almost to academic interest in mainstream IT until Borland extended and reintroduced it in Delphi, to great acclaim. These days the broad reach of the net allows people like NOLOH and eT to carve new niches based on the competitive advantage they offer and without getting bogged down in particular languages. Bring on the abstraction, right? ;-)

Agreed.