Dan wrote: "Can you give us the initials of this ... person? :)"

...and where does he/she live? :-)

I think FoxPro is a wonderful tool for solving all kinds of business problems. Having or not having a C/S degree may or may not impact how somebody uses the tool. I started with FP years ago, (after BASIC and dBase). I first learned SQL through by using it through FP and now I'm (sorta kinda) learning OOP through FP. In the meantime I'm also chipping away at a Masters in Information Technology from from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and virtually everything that I've learned in FP has been applicable in one form or another to the course work for this degree. I used SQL on IBM mainframes, and will be using OOP principals in other languages, I'm sure.

My undergrad degree is in music.

If I was hiring a programmer, I would much rather have somebody who is well versed in VFP rather than somebody who knows all of the ins and outs, of, say, the UML or other higher-level analysis methodologies. But most FP programmers that I know are dealing very much at the nuts and bolts level, not at the abstract computer science/research level. In short, we need to crank out 1.) code, and 2.) new classes so we don't have to crank out so much of 1.

I work as a constractor and consultant, and the important thing is to be conversant in the tool for which one is hired. This can change from month to month...and I'm casting about for other languages and competencies for the time when maybe FP is no longer as popular as it is in my locale.

FWIW many mediocre computer science programs are still stuck down doing things like Cobol and Pascal. At the University of Vt, where I worked for 9 years, I never bothered getting a degree from the CS dept (even though it would have been free) because it was a complete waste of time.

So.... it depends



--- Larry