>Just read your article, and couple comments. First off, your writer is terrific and interesting. I assume Portuguese is your natural language - how did you learn to write so well in English (I am not being funny here, just personally amazed how good those from other places are with English). I could say the the same thing about a number of others here (from Russia, etc.) who just seem to write so well in English.

Thank you very much for the compliment, Mel. Yes, Portuguese is my primary language. I believe my writing skills in English comes from just reading a lot. I'm not too good with grammar rules (not even in Portuguese), but I enjoy reading a lot, so when I'm writing I *just know* that's how it's supposed to be written, because I've probably read similar sentence elsewhere. :)

Another thing that also helps me, and other people whose English is their first language (or so I think): most of us are very conscious about trying to speak and write proper English (I know I am); I believe that makes us put quite a bit of effort into getting really good at it. In my case, it gets to a point where I can usually spot spelling errors from a mile away, and it also makes me feel something weird when I hear any American messing up bad with the language (I didn't really learn English at school, so I think anybody who started learning English at age 1 or 2 should have a much better command of the language than I do). :)

And it's interesting how learning spoken languages and programming languages has many similarities: for instance, learning the first language is difficult (due to the sheer volume of things to understand, such as verbs, nouns, subjects, etc), the second language is hard (in a way because we keep trying to think from the stand point of the primary language), the third one gets much easier.

>Second comment, surely it was longer than "several years ago" that you switched from Clipper to Fox and Visual Foxpro... :)

yup, from dBase to Clipper, then to Fox, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, C#, etc... I'll always switch to whatever it is that both allows me to have fun *and* make some money out of it. Can't beat that. :)

>Looking forward to the articles...always ready to learn about something new.

Thank you. I'm very excited about this series, so hopefully there's going to be something helpful here and there. :)