>Hi Mike,
>
>do you have personal experience leading to the conclusion that there is corporate resistance? I work closely with 2 market-niche-leader, enterprise, multi-national applications. I have heard exactly 1 consideration about FoxPro, and that was about the future path for development, not the present. And the reason wasn't the application itself, but rather was the maintaining of extending add-ins written by the customer that this particular application has the ability to integrate with the application.
>
>My conclusion, based on 100's of installations of these products, is that no one cares what it is written in. Oh, once and a while an IT guy, who does not have purchasing decision, will say "FoxPro?" And we say yes, we can use it to produce and maintain SQL Server apps better than in any other language at this point in time. And that's the end of the discussion.
>
>Hank

That must be a mighty small/closed market where people don't care about the underlying technology.

My personal experience is that even when VFP was a viable Microsoft tool there was generally resistance to it that had to be overcome. Sometimes I could overcome that resistance based on price and development speed.

Now that it is no longer a current Microsoft product, potential customers immediately want to keep away from it unless there is some extrordinary reason that it has to be used rather than current technology that is in widespread use (VFP never was). Price and development speed are no longer significantly different with VFP. Antiquated interface, lack of developer support, lack of Microsoft support, the thought of local tables (although I never store data that way), etc all work against it.

Yes. It's dead. Bury it.



>
>>All true, no doubt. But what you are talking about is internal considerations by the development group, i.e. you and coworkers. There is still a lot of corporate resistance to FoxPro solutions, at least in this country.
>>
>>>We've got some 'big' customers and occasionally they ask for what its written in, but since we're a market leader in the niche we are in, there is nobody at clients who possibly could have the expertise to maintain it themselves. Its too scientific, technical and complex that even training a new developer at our team would take approx a year to find his way through the product. Most developers ussually get aquainted with only a portion of it.
>>>
>>>Our application is huge, measured by its complexity and flexibility. We have problems that relate to maintaining this monsterous application, but none of those problems really have anything to with the language. Changing to a static typed language would things only worse, as things that are so simple in VFP can become a real nightmare in strict typed languages as the codebase explodes enormously.
>>>
>>>We probably need something that is repository based at runtime (not development time), but the transition will be painfull, esspecially if you want to maintain backward compatibility.
>>>
>>>We are not immune to the changes on development tools, but we are looking forward to a tool that makes our lives easier and certainly not more difficult even if that one is more mainstream. All of our team members need to know more than just a programming language: They need to know the the scientifical background as well, which makes it about impossible to switch to a total different platform by just hiring new people.
>>>
>>>Walter
>>>
>>>
>>>>You beat me to it.
>>>>
>>>>>Big customers care. They want to make sure they have expertise in house to support the app.
>>>>>
>>>>>>BINGO! Besides no customer needs to know what the platform is.