>. >>The more you learn, the more you CAN learn.
>
>That's true.
>The VFP developers who stretched VFP with N-tier development, SQL backends, etc have a much easier time moving to other platforms.
>Now that I'm working on other platforms, I'm wishing I had stretched VFP more, even tho the immediate apps I was developing didn't require it.
>In the original mainframe world, which began with the Sort, Summarize, List pattern, those developers who took the trouble to learn to develop CRT-based real time mainframe applications had no trouble moving to mini's and PC's.

Agreed! Even more common than not having used any real n-tier logic or approach, I've met a few VFP developers who cannot even trace through the inheritance levels, have never worked with multiple back-ends or anything beyond dbfs, do more than simple xml in/out, print to pdf other than through pushing a report to pdf, communicate with a web service, use the windows api, com interop, or many other tasks. Sometimes it is simply because they have never had to and some never try to go beyond what is required. Yet they consider themselves senior developers because they have been using the tool and producing business apps for years. That may have been considered exemplary programming in that environment, but definitely not in an environment with greater requirements. Sometimes a person doesn't know what they don't know until confronted with new business requirements (if they are not actively researching the capabilities and extensibility of their own tool beyond their own requirements).

Some of the ex-VFP developers (or those working in more than just VFP) who pushed VFP to its limits are better .net developers now. I know of a lot of .net developers who are just like those in VFP that don't go beyond basic programming and concepts in .net as well. It has nothing to do with the specific language. The only foot up on those VFP developers stuck in simple programming trying to move to .net (or forced later to move to anything new be it java or whatever) is they know the syntax already and some of the syntax or concepts between multiple languages is very similar.