It isn't application maintenance that my customers worry about. It's database. So, if we use Oracle or SQL Server, they're happy. Most anything else they don't want.

>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>Walter