I'd like to toss out another explanation for VB's supremacy over VFP at the moment.

VFP developers generally are *real* programmers. That is, we value our time highly, we hate to do anything twice, we enjoy a tool that allows us to turn systematic plans into reality. We worry about things like maintainability, scalability, error trapping, robustness, etc.

I was taught most of what was important about programming back in a high school PASCAL course. The ideas were: document your work, plan ahead, use structured languages only (that's back when we were using GOTO's at home in our TRS-80 BASIC programs), make subroutines out of commonly used code, etc., etc., etc.

I am astounded at how many programmers come out of school these days and appear never to have heard of any of this. Of course VB looks great, it has such a short time-to-first-form, no planning required! Of course, what Mom and Dad taught still holds: if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. Something that appears to make large jobs possible without planning is selling a deception about one of the basic facts of life.