The eye opener for me came about 10 years ago. I was contracting for a company that had a commercial package for securities firms (most of the big ones). While I was following the existing app around with a shovel and bucket two other people were rewriting it in C++ and SQL Server. The difference in speed was stunning. The main daily app ran overnight, downloading trading transactions -- every trade executed on the NYSE the previous day -- to analyze them for best execution price. In VFP it ran for several hours and it was always a struggle to have it finish before the start of the next day's trading. In C++ / SS it ran in about 20 minutes. "Nothing runs like the Fox" was the Kool Aid we all drank back then.

>Hi All,
>
>I am doing a raw speed test on some very simple operations to compare basic VFP operations with another language. Would some of you care to do a similar test against another language of your choice? e.g. Python, PHP, VB.Net, whatever. I am looking for VFP speed vs. language_of_your_choice speed on the same machine. Here are two simple tests manipulating some numbers and building a string in VFP
>
>
>

>CLEAR
>tStartTime = SECONDS()
>ta=0
>FOR i = 1 TO 1000000
>  ta = Log(i) + Cos(i) + Sin(i) + Log(i) + exp(i)
>next  
>? SECONDS() - tStartTime 
>
>*
>
>tStartTime = SECONDS()
>ta = ""
>FOR i = 1 TO 1000000
>  ta = ta + "xx"
>next  
>? SECONDS() - tStartTime 
>