>>>>She deserves to continue on. And I still have plans to complete Visual FreePro, Jr. and Visual FreePro. I have a course to get there, and it's taking time.
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>>>hmmm ... I guess that I just take a far more practical approach to coding. VFP for me is a tool, like the hammer I have lying in the garage; it does a job for me which is putting nails into things. If someone sold me another tool that did that job faster/easier/cheaper and/or replaced the need for nails entirely I would buy it and throw away the hammer.
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>>I consider the framework to be a little more than the tool. VFP is an encapsulation of a set of abilities, and the tools are the ability to create table, or cursor, an index, access ActiveX/OLE, develop forms, respond to events, bind to events, etc. Those are all tools. And I look at third-party add-ons as extensions to those base tools.
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>>I agree there are more capable tools today, but not in the same form factor, not in the same type of encapsulation (factoring in also the form factor). VFP is and always will be, in my opinion, in a class of its own, though I also tend to look at where it is / where it wound up as being part and parcel of where it could've gone with the next iterations. I look at things through the "what could've been" eyes, hence my work with VFrP and VJr.
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>There is little point to compare "form factor" between VFP9 and any modern IDE. The modern IDE simply does vastly more things in vastly different ways.There is no purpose served to compare this metric. Like I said, even if a tool takes up 200Gb of disk space, requires it's own dedicated SSD even!, I couldn't care so long as it helps me produce solutions for clients faster and easier and I can turn those solutions into a business. We are about the end-results the tool can produce. You seem focused on the tool.

My focus is primarily on not being bloaty, and not moving forward simply because technology can. There has to be purpose and meaning in a change, and not just because it's newer, shinier, is supported by company X, etc.

We should be looking at what people need, and then designing tools to meet those needs. What VFP9 offers is what most businesses need. It needs a better database engine, it needs some web access, it needs a UI facelift, but the ability to input data, store it, query it, report on it, in simple ways average everyday users can understand, and to do it locally without the need of cloud resources, is what companies need. They should have the ability to share on "the cloud" (I hate that term), but it should not be required.

My goals with Visual FreePro were to allow the developers who had put man-years of labor into their apps to continue them forward, and then to let us as a community determine which way we think the technology should go. We would then add whatever new features and abilities are required to that existing VFP-like base.

These remain my goals, by the way. I work with applications that have literally been in use by companies for 20+ years, and they are debugged, feature-rich, capable, and we are adding new features all the time. There is no shortage of issue from an app's functionality point-of-view in VFP9. We have issues with caching on network machines, and in a lack of data security in table and index storage, but those are limitations Visual FreePro sought to overcome.

I could not get the company I work for to support my development of Visual FreePro because I had no plans to sell it. And even though they would've gotten a new VFP-equivalent language with source code, it wasn't enough of an incentive to them.

It's been a tremendous disappointment in my life that this tool has not been placed in people's hands. It would also tug at the market and guide people toward simpler tools which can be extended intelligently to make our VFP-like development faster, better, and more productive. I actually have some rather substantial design considerations in those areas, but they all take time to develop. I have needed five other developers helping me on this project to see my vision through. I expected to find them by 2014, but not one came forward. It truly broke my heart back then, and I proceeded alone until working myself sick in 2015. It wasn't until two+ years later I began to recover from that illness. It's only been this year that I've actually felt good again.