The classic comment on this topic was by Tom Watson, the early leader of IBM. (Not the golfer). He said the railroad companies went wrong thinking they were in the railroad business, not the transportation business.

I guess as software developers we are in the ultimate ever-changing business. A year ago is a long time ago in software.

>I generally agree with what you have said except for me creativity, learning and expanding one's world lies not in the development tool or platform but in the application of those tools to solving the problem. I really couldn’t care less about the tool per se. I have no attachment to development tools, including VFP. I care about the solution I end up with.
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>There is a classic management tale about Black & Dekker, the power tool company. When the management were asked by a business consultant what business they thought they were in the management resoundingly said electric drills (this was back in the day when they only did drills). The consultant replied that this was, in fact, not their business at all. B&D are in the business of selling holes. If tomorrow they invented a device which made those holes with a laser they would be selling lasers and not electric drills. They are in the hole making business. Similarly for me. I am not in the development tool business and learning a new one does not enhance my life per se. The solutions I put together with whatever development tools I use enhance my life and business.
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>>I think you've stated it very well from the pragmatic point of view and I know it comes from someone who has very successfully applied that approach. And probably the best answer to Scott's situation.
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>>I would like to only add one element on a more philosophical ( or maybe it is psychological ) level. ( which is not really in response to what you wrote but since you made the best argument for continuing with VFP it did cause me to wonder "So why wouldn't I even consider doing that?" )
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>>There are many reasons to do something and rewards come in a variety of shapes.
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>>People get into this profession in many different ways and for many different reasons. And the makeup of the people getting involved has changed over the years. I know when I started doing this - and I suspect when you did as well - it was rare to find anyone who had seen a computer - much less studied how to do something with one - when at university.
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>>We were mostly self-taught, fascinated by the power of learning the magic words that made our strange little robots dance. We figured it out as we went along, shared ideas, and invented stuff when what we needed in the language wasn't there.
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>>And change came rapidly and we embraced it because God knows at that stage the languages and design ideas needed a lot of change and you had to have an open mind at all times to something new.
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>>Many of the most successful ( or at least most interesting ) programmers I knew were musicians or philosophy majors or just weird people who finally found a place to play where they wouldn't get bored and they could meet a lot of very smart - and/or very weird people.
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>>But the exciting thing was that you could spend a day learning new stuff and literally double your knowledge in that day. It was a rush.
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>>As we actually started to make money with this stuff we found niches and specialties and decided to cash in on some of what we had learned.
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>>For some of us, that was the goal. We found that chord and soldered it.
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>>For some of us that was just a nice thing that happened along the way. The really great thing was that we had finally found where the smart kids hang out and where there would *always* be new things to learn where you could never get bored.
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>>VFP got stagnant for me when I realized in the previous 3 years (2001-2004) of developing in VFP/VFE/SQL and having my greatest success with it financially I had learned the least I had learned since I started programming in 1978. That killed it for me. It was the same old 12 bar blues.
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>> And I looked around me at the people who I thought were the best and the brightest of the people I had admired in the Fox community 10 years before and saw it had apparently killed it for a lot of them too. Most of them had already gone on to find adventure and excitement in new lands.
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>>At any rate, my main motivation for looking for other ways to solve business problems with computers was more than anything else that I was bored with the tool I was using, it was obvious no major change was coming and there were 100 new shiny things to fascinate me and I got back the feeling I had in the early 80s when I first got a dBase program to do what I wanted it to do.
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>>And as I work full time now using C# and TSQL in a primarily Winforms enterprise environment that requires me to expand my knowledge of a lot of stuff way beyond what it was a year ago, a lot of my personal time goes into learning stuff I am not using at work at all - WPF, Entity Framework, SOA, javascript and whatever else catches my eye. I don't know what is next but I know whatever is next I want to be just as challenging as this was when I started it.
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>>And I realize that for many others that may not resonate at all and the greatest satisfaction may be in getting to the sweet spot where you have something that works for you as a tool and you can do your work with it without further investment in learning new things and that is a good thing.
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>>But I think some other folks in the community when looking at someplace where they certainly *could* use VFP for something new might very well ask themselves "But why?"
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>>Intellectual comfort and professional success are very nice, and sometimes nice enough to put a damper on curiosity.
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>>If that day ever comes for me, I will definitely find another way to make a living. Hopefully doing something that I currently know nothing about :-)
>>( which certainly leaves me a very large playing field <s> )
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