Thanks Thomas and John for extending this short thread :-) I certainly agree with most remarks by Thomas in his fair contrasting of fox vs python. Not all of them of course :-)

I am more than truly delighted with what I am able to achieve at this stage and will start to code python again after a short interrupt (my previous python coding period was 1999-2003..). Except for deployment which python remains some sort of hack (Nuitka sort of help though). IMHO python dev environment is absolutely gorgeous. So much so that I do not want to quit coding. I possibly should but I am addicted. Again!

In the end, I am adamant than python full open-source character was a real handicap in its early days as it started as some sort of "poor competitor" also-ran status to, say, Java or dotnet.

Python did not enjoy java-level industry-support status. Java had. Dotnet did as well. It meant a lot at that time. During the late 90s I could not convince any one among my coding buddies to pay attention to it. I tried hard though. Python was no buzzword at that time :-) But in the end its "open source" community proved its main asset. It still does.

Right from the start, this "python community" proved quite diverse in terms skills and interests. Other "communities" were great as well. I learned to appreciated Perl and PHP ones. Ruby was certainly great. But I could get into the beast. These "communities" were quite welcoming but certainly not as wide in interests as python.

In the end, may I say I miss the great fox community of these times, the 90s. Here on the UT and in the few places I was able, quite rarely tough, to meet a few active members of the community in person. So many smart and pleasant fellows!

MS brought so much to IT on a global basis. But it certainly missed a few things (so say the least) including keeping this vfp code private. Fox never was "open source". It certainly could have on the win32 platform.