>Any career in any field can be influenced by outside forces. You shouldn't have been surprised by Microsoft's >decision. I blogged about it happening two years before the announcement. You're right in that Microsoft is not >responsible for your career, but you are blaming them for your inabilities to follow what was happening with VFP >and not learning other technlogies.

>IMO, every computer language out there has risks of not being supported in the future. .NET? Yep. Java? Oracle >says they'll keep updating it, but right now Sun is losing $100 million per month. Oracle may decide that Java is >one thing they can drop. Open Source? There have been lots of projects that started out with lots of momentum, >only to die. Could happen to Python, Ruby, etc.

I never said I did not see it coming. Thanks to the members of this list I started looking, testing, and learning years before the actual announcement. Still I'm bitter. I made my living using VFP (just like others on this list). I influenced the sale of many copies of VFP (maybe several hundred). What else could I have done. Yet MS made their decision.

Yes it is true that FOSS projects die. But I can't see how Python, Java or Ruby (don't know much about Ruby) can just go away like VFP. The source code is available for all three languages. And therefore I can do as I see fit with the source. I see it more like the market place saying I don't want you to use Python for the project.

That said, I don't see it changing much for the near future. But it will change. Today Java jobs are about 5 to 1 for C# jobs. Even if you count all the .Net languages there are more Java jobs available. I gather that information from the job websites. And Python is always in the top 10 of languages used for development. Python books are still being written. So I feel save with Python. But times change and that may go away not but because some company makes it so.

And consider this most FOSS languages are cross platform. And most support desktop and web interfaces.