Charles --

what and interesting and thoughtful post!

There was a time in my life when I was tired of being a "perpetual grunt." It stemmed from a long line of new beginnings I had to endure, beginning with kinderkarden, going through primary, middle and high schools, on to college, through the army, through various jobs (journalism, cabinet making, back to college to learn software engineering (Assembly, FORTRAN), software design at NASA, learning PDP11, DEC VAX, Cyber 9600 mainframe, learning dBase II, dBase III, Foxpro, on to starting my own consultancy, on to starting my own business, and on and on it goes. I felt like I never really achieved the enlightened state of a guru at anything I learned, because I had to keep moving in order to not be mowed down by some competition or another.

I finally got to a point where I could write Foxpro code in my sleep (and I probably did!) and do it extremely fast and efficiently. I was learning nothing new on a daily basis, but I was happy with the enlightened stasis. Then MS pulled the rug out from under VFP, sort of, and I was forced to think beyond the horizon, and so I became a grunt yet again, this time with .NET. I started mastering C# and Winforms development only to learn that MS was NOTt going to enhance Winforms any more, that this, too, was eventually a dead-end technology. Back to scanning the horizon, and off I went into Silverlight Land, XAML the torpedoes! With Silverlight, VS 2010 beta, RIA/Silverlight 4 beta, Blend, etc. etc. I found that either my brain is not as elastic as it used to be at 35 some 20 years ago, or that MS has made new development methodologies extremely obscure, difficult and inefficient. However, as I learn more I'm starting to see some valid reasoning behind these approaches as well.

Anyhow, I believe that embracing change is in our evolution-hardened genetic make-up, because without it we would have perished as a species a long time ago. On the other hand, energy conservation (such as avoiding change) is also part of our genetic make-up, so those two will always fight each other, and as a result some of us go for the change and some of us stay away from it. In the end, it is hard to say for sure which approach is better in these particular circumstances, because for example the hard-to-find-and-thus-extremely-expensive Cobol programmers are doing just fine without having to have changed a bit over the last many decades, whereas guys like you and me on the leading/bleeding edge are definitely losing their hair <g> trying to keep up.

In the end, there are very few paradigm shifts, just different ways of dealing with the same old things. The older you get the more you understand processes, and that's what really matters. Computer languages, IDEs, APIs etc. are just different ways to deal with processes which themselves don't change much over time. I speak four different (human) languages more or less well, and recently I found that picking up a fifth one is not that difficult because I can lean on what I've already learned from the other four. The same way, having learned object orientation and other important programming concepts in VFP has helped me tremendously in moving to C#.

>Not directed at you personally, Mike, but what you said - which makes a certain kind of sense - got me thinking about something very basic that seems to get overlooked in our discussions of the pros and cons of moving from Fox to something new. Sometimes the choices are driven by employer decisions etc but for those of us who are independent developers, consultants and software designers there seems to be a difference in how we approach the issue. I am 62 and if I thought the rest of *my* career was going to involve supporting legacy apps - especially those written by others - I'd put a gun in my mouth. You seem to find it a source of comfort. - and we are both right. We are just very different people. And I think that essential difference explains a lot about why there are such divergent reactions to this seismic change in our "community".
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>I guess for me the question is why did we get into this to begin with and what non-monetary rewards do we derive from it.
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>Personally, I was fascinated by something new and powerful and intellectually challenging.
>Five or six years ago I realized that in a month of intense Fox work if I increased my knowledge or skillset by 1% I was having a good month - the rest of the time it was those same old twelve bar blues. If I hadn't switched entirely to a SQL Server back end a couple years before and Mike and Toni hadn't been doing such interesting things with VFE I think my disillusionment would have come earlier than that.
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>I was making a lot of money and I derived a certain satisfaction, as I've always done, from system analysis, mentoring and project rescue for other developers, but the language I was using was not growing in significantly exciting ways and the resources and a pool of brain power dedicated to its future were diminishing rapidly.
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>One of the big attractions of learning .NET was that the learning curve was so steep and the peak so far away. I was ignorant enough to be able to double my knowledge daily <bg>
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>Most of the developers I admired most were getting excited by other things and while still trying - for the most part - to be sensitive to the feelings of their professional friends who would be perfectly happy to program in Fox forever - were moving away from Fox.
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>The excitement that made this fun in 1995 was gone. VFP was a good as it ever was - just as a 21" Sylvania vacuum tube TV with rabbit ears might still get a picture that in in 1962 would have you dreaming of color in front of the picture window of Gene's TV and Appliance store.
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>VFP isn't dead. It is exactly as good as it ever was for all the things it is good for and that was and is a lot. And there are some bright folks making commendable efforts to expand its utility into the future. But for me it is no longer exciting and new and fun and there are a whole lot of things it will never do and a whole lot of apps one will never be asked to create if one insists on using it. And anyone who is any good at it cannot keep learning new stuff at the rate we did in 1995.
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>The thing I like about .NET now is what I liked about Fox 20 years ago - it was a challenge and you could do things with it you couldn't do using anything else ... or at least using what you were currently using. And a lot of very very smart people were putting a lot of effort into using, improving, teaching and expanding it. And new smart people were joining the ranks every day to offer their contributions and perspectives.
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>UT or Foxite are probably the best resources for Fox developers to share expertise. Compare them with Stackoverflow, Code Project or a dozen other sites and that alone would be reason for me to want to be involved in .NET.
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>Embracing change or innovation is not a requirement to be happy. But some professions encourage it more than others. CPAs and blacksmiths don't see it as a big plus.
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>But for guys like me - who got into this as about his fifth career because it was a head rush and I could be surrounded by some mental horsepower that impressed me - I am very grateful that something came along that got me excited about software development again.
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>>>I used to be a VFP pro, I switched to c# a few years ago and not looking back.
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>>>So, I had a tought about this place tonight and I was wondering how this whole thing is still holding together...
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>>>Back for news... no flame please....
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>>Stephane, as you know ,I have made a living from Foxpro since 1986 and the more of you leave Foxpro for something else, to more work I have to support what you guys leave behind. So keep on leaving Foxpro, I'll never retire.