>>Just as one can create pieces of crap with VFP, using the VS doesn't mean the product will be good.
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>That's the central point, probably the most sensible in this whole thread.
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>As I write in message ID 1639037, releasing high-class software has nothing to do with tools, it's just another hen and egg story.
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>The best example is what happened in the JavaScript world:
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>Until 2005, JavaScript was considered as a second-class dev language, merely for dumb web designers: no tool whatsoever, just a text editor and a lot of patience; object oriented without inheritance; no way to pass parameters by reference; weird 'closure' concept that can make debugging a nightmare, etc.
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>Then developers started to put together frameworks on top of each others, sharing them under some FOSS licenses, then came the tools like smart text editors, browser dev tools like Firebug, then tools over tools like GitHub (a majority of projects on GitHub are JS), the server side S/W (nodeJS), etc.
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>JavaScript developers became more and more professional, maybe the most rigorous I've seen around.
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>While all this happened, JavaScript was still the same contemptible, dumb language for amateurs.
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>So, if you are a virtuoso using a tool and this tool works fine, just keep it, you'll always be better than trying to use someone else's tool.
>And if you share with others, you'll always move up and forward.
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>As of the old saying: there are more bad workers than bad tools.

Fundamentally disagree with the gist of your post. In essence what you are saying is that if you are an expert in VFP then you should stick with VFP because it will take 2 years to be expert in anything else. I dont think this is a good reflection of the state most (VFP) developers find themselves in.

In the first place, most (VFP) developers are not experts - most of us, by definition, will fall along the bell curve middle area. But more than this, is it better to be an expert developer in an old language with old IDE and old tools or a decent developer in a modern language with modern IDE and tools? The latter, imo, easily wins this argument because modern development tools do so much for the developer its unbelievable. In a modern language with modern tools so very many things are just done out of the box, ready made; many tools can be applied with little or even no coding. So many new controls to work with.

Personally I can refer to WinDev, which I am NOT expert in at all by any measure; it is years ahead of anything I could do in VFP (or at least what I could do easily). An average developer like me is easily 5 times faster in development than in VFP (which I have used since dBase II days). And a good VFP developer with solid coding insights will be up and running in 6 months or less. It is so far ahead of VFP9 it's unreal. And .Net IDE and tools are, I am sure, the same.

What you are saying is the that an expert doctor without access to modern equipment (x-ray, MRI, etc.) is better than a decent (obviously qualified) doctor who does have access to modern equipment. I rather go with the latter.

I think a better argument to stay with VFP, as has been expressed here several times, is the existence of a large code-base which works and does not have a business case for a re-write into something else. That makes sense (e.g. Walter Meester for example). But to build new, commercial apps with VFP ... that doesn't make sense.

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