>>Python is also a very interesting environment.
Yes. It's mature, it has everything I could think of, and none of the gadgets that would sound good to the sales department. So it's clean, written by programmers for programmers.
>>How important is C# nowadays?
My so-called apprentice here has tried it for years, went to some depths to do the complex business we usually did in fox, and in the end it's the same as what students of electrotechnics here wrote below Tesla's monument: "Tesla, couldn't it be a little simpler?". Still he complains about lack of this or that, or the many ways to do control-to-field binding (including "one replace, one ten-word line"), or the cases when a three-liner in fox becomes twenty-liner in C#. While I never really learned C# and can't say whether he's just PO'd, I've seen some examples he sent me and... yuck.
>I am actually going through an exercise right now to re-write a VFP app that I have had going for 15 years or more.
Just 30 years here, from 1989 to the last day at work.
>My requirements for the replacement are:
>1. It needs to run on Windows, Linux, Mac (it could be a web solution for these) and be native Android & iOS
Python does.
>2. Could be run as SaaS or onsite
Can write both.
>3. The development tool/environment needs to have good support
And it's free. The most important thing about support is that when you google for something, you get what you were looking for on the first page. You don't have to manually discard ads, blurbs, articles related to the 2001 version, training material for beginners, sponsored fora with "don't forget to mark this reply a solution, I want to be a VIP" scattered throughout the text. Daughter just complained how she was looking for a solution to a particular problem in C# and it took her two days to finally find something and apply the solution. Then a few months later had to do the same thing in Python, ran into the same problem, found online solution for it, applied and tested it in two hours.
>4. Development should be quick (provide some sort of framework where I need to pretty much only provide business logic.
I'm using Dabo, by our good friends Ed Leafe and Paul McNett. Written by foxers for foxers. The syntax is Py, of course, but the logic is very fox, it clearly separates gui from bizobjects from db access, and has ready classes for each. Its class designer is using some deprecated features of Gtk, so it won't work (I would have fixed it myself, I'd know where to look, but hand-coding a form is so simple that I didn't bother). (OTOH, submitting my fixes would mean to learn git - which would be my sixth or seventh source control, and everything is named differently in git, so I gave up).
>5. Should be able to handle different cultures/locales
Uses linux tools for building translation files. Python is handling UTF-8 all the way, and it's the default string class. You may complicate your life and use non-unicode, but why?
>6. Should be affordable (preferably free :0) )
Free it is.
7: good nice GUI - I'm using PyCharm, took about two minutes to install and an hour to learn. It's so laden with features (mostly developed for other languages, it's a fork from InetelliJ, also open source. Integrates source handling (editor, bookmark, breakpoints) and a debugger. Debugger is actually quite intelligent, spoiled me immediately :).
