>Another article was about to create collections from data sources. Lots and lots of code to create classes that can read a data row and create an object in memory to manipulate. Egads again - SCATTER NAME oObject anyone? Even his extensive classes would be mjaybe 10 lines of VFP code.

I wouldn't be surprised it it was written by an ex-foxer. The length of code is surprising, though. I've seen fox functions done in C# - not too bad, perhaps a few lines each on the average. But then there's the mandatory prolog with all those "using", "module" and whatnot, lines designed to help the compiler and linker put these all together, and not really doing anything in the current code. Reminds me of the Cobol sections, where you had to write at least a meter of text before you got to the first line which would do something.

>Another article was about using PHP to access MySQL data. The code was about 5 times longer than VFP code. Here I am willing to give a little - the requirement was to be able to run the code on Linux and Windows servers not under the client's control. I assume they have enough control to install PHP, so the requirement circumsances beg an explanation. So on second thought I may or may not give a little.

What? I've seen that seven years ago, and actually used it for a few weeks on a pet project. Someone's reinventing the wheel, or reselling old stuff as new. Article recycling i Code magazine, or they just didn't know until now that the thing existed? Or they thought their readers didn't know? I concur with the "egads" part.

Seems to be that everybody's trying to make a silver bullet to make programmers' life easier and more efficient, but ends up with yet another silver-like casing around the existing casings on the same old lead.