>>>>>> (thus we really won't see too many new VFP developers)
>>>>>Is there such a thing as a new VFP developer?
>>>>
>>>>My daughter...
>>>
>>>She must have an old soul ;)
>>
>>She said "ah it's so like Java, with those try-catch things". She's only using the non-visual part of it, most of the time, doing a biz layer for a web app.
>
>I rarely get to look at fox now. I am spending increasing amounts of time working on Dynamics CRM data migration and other Dynamics integration .People used to complain that Foxpro and Access meant amateurs developed bad systems. Dynamics CRM seems to be like that on steroids. I'm looking at a system at the moment that has lookup values for countries in the stringmap table for loading contacts and wonder of wonders they have an identical list of countries under a different name for loading organisations. Rather than use out of the box functions developers will nilly re-invent the wheel. Companies are spending millions of pound on this on this stuff when I'm confident a small team of good developers could build bespoke solutions for a fraction of the price. Why do I do it. Because more and more that seems to be where the work and money is.

I've seen things like that even when professional programmers were doing it, because they were strictly imitating the manual process. In accounting, there were separate accounts for each customer and each suppliers. They'd be re-created every year, with numbers assigned by order of appearance. I had to do a little coup by 1) keeping the numbers permanent, i.e. not necessarily starting with 1 every year and 2) merging those lists. So after just a few months I could have a useful report showing the same business partner's debts and credits - because, ah guess what, the same company was often both a customer and a supplier. And then the next year they had the same sub-account number which didn't change, so even looking it up was faster. Would have been faster when done manually, too, but that's accounting - the area where thinking was discouraged :).