>I know that some IT folk like delving into the engine- but that does not make it best practice since we ought to pay for our own hobbies. ;-)

John, that is not what's I said is happening - I said (or I hope I said) that fox provided syntax sugar. Even in fox, if you needed some other event procedure to happen you had to write it. It's not that I want to get to the engine level. It was always there.

That said, I agree that the it appears we are going backwards with current tools to create programs or apps. Or maybe, I could say, what we have today is not what I'd consider to be the 5th gen languages!

But it's also true that we (programmers) have access to more and are doing more than was envisioned when fox appeared. 4th gen languages would have trouble dealing with tablets or phones or chromebooks, or watches! The device environment changed. So the programming languages changed with the environment - we went backwards to allow the access to the "engine" level. I didn't want to go backwards.

Of course things are changing - javascript frameworks are moving us forward, CSS3 framworks allows to change the look and feel, and HTML5 allows more too. But just as Hank points out it's a pain dealing will all of different ways to modify program. It won't be long before someone comes up with 6th gen language that eases the way - just like fox did for us!

Johnf