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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.

Rick, I am sorry to hear of these struggles but that is also the way of the world. In my career I have learned and used many languages to one degree or another. Some survived, some not. Some were awesome like SmallTalk and Actor, true object oriented languages, but they are gone. Others like Prolog, Fourth, also gone. Some languages have their day in the sun. And then there are very many other great development tools that people use every day to produce amazing products that solve client problems. I don’t get married to my tools, I use them and drop them as market conditions dictate. We (my business) is not in the software business at all. We are in the business of solving client problems and coding software just happens to be a way to do that at this time. Maybe tomorrow coding will be old-hat and a new technology does it 100 times easier. For us, right now, WinDev/WebDev is far and away ahead of VFP9. ymmv.

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