>>>>>>Thousands of lines of code copying the code back to the fp cursors, and trying to keep all that in sync - then on save building SPT statements. That's right - NO DATA BINDING.
>>>>
>>>>Yep. Then that developer moved to NET and loudly proclaimed that he couldn't understand why anybody would continue using VFP. ;-)
>>>
>>>Well, yeah. Kind of like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. My guess is though he found the compiler and strong typing way too fussy and has been moving on looking for something "more developer friendly" - I hear two autistic schizophrenics in the mountains of Baluchistan are developing a new language that doesn't even require a platform. Moving, moving, moving. Is this what they mean by "mobile application development"? I hear that's the future <bg>
>>>
>>>Me, I'm stickin' with rockin' the Fox ( in this case, the Golden Fox)
>>
>>ya I think our Fox is gonna need an AARP card before long. Micro$oft support will end for it the end of 2014 if I remember correctly so I think the days of NEW fox development are pretty much over for us - but legacy apps could go on quite a bit longer, and as we know some of the VFP apps out there are quite large and they'll want to keep them running as long as possible.
>
>Well, if somebody offered me this kind of money to write a WFP EF Prism Devforce C# app I'd be a very happy camper, but there is also some sweetness in being able to squeeze this kind of juice out of Foxpro skills I forgot I had and figured they ranked right up there with stuff I learned in college as a future source of income.
>
>But right now I'm feeling very Fox friendly. <bg> It's like a Cobol shop in 1999.

Feel free to forward me any overflow leads. I'm serious.

I did not jump on that Y2K COBOL bandwagon, although I had many offers due to my sordid past. Some folks I had worked with told me they made 200K-300K that year doing grunt work. Which is a good thing, because after 1/1/2000 their best option was selling apples on the sidewalk.

From what I hear there is still a market for IBM assembler programmers, which is how I spent the first seven years of my career. Some of those old systems are still running and the talent pool is retiring (or worse). A guy I used to work with on VFP and SQL Server, even more senior than me, said swallow your pride and take the money. Probably good advice. Good lord, though. JCL? DATA DIVISION? I didn't like COBOL the first time around.

As much as COBOL chafed, I always loved assembler. It was a pure language and a great way to learn fundamentals. You weren't down to the metal but you could see it from there. It was all about registers and displacement addressing. What made it tricky was there were only 16 registers, only 12 of which you were officially supposed to use. (Rules are made to be broken, up to a point). The biggest program in the commercial app I worked on was the Slot program, which was responsible for finding the best location to place an incoming pallet of groceries. The algorithm was quite complicated and it was necessary to retrieve data about items, slots, available slots (a separate file in those bad old days), purchase orders, and many others. That was in addition to basic mechanics like the registers needed by the program itself. Each register could address 4K of memory. It was often a juggling act. But what fun. I could probably still pick up an assembly listing of the slot program and be right at home.