>"shrinking market" or "limited market-share" is simply an ignorant position - There are a lot more Toyotas (large market-share) than Mercedes, but few would argue that a Benz is a bad car!
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>Quantity does not mean quality...
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>My read on Delphi is third-party via one of my ex-programmers - he liked it very much, thought it was more "stable" than VFP (however, it was back in the days of VFP3, the first and buggy version of VFP).
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>I can do anything I want in VFP. If I was in your position I would make a list of "showstoppers" and "absolute gotta-haves". Whatever environment fit in (or out of) these lists would point me to the correct choice. Also, I cross-platform into Linux is a "reasonable" possiblity trhen Delphi is your choice.
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That's an overstatement. Delphi can do things at a low level much better than VFP - I'd not want to write a device driver in VFP, and at present at least, VFP can't create ActiveX Controls - Delphi can. It also can do things more efficiently with structures than VFP, in large part because of how VFP manages its variables and name space. Both tools have a place - I just find that most places that I'd choose Delphi over VFP, I'd rather use C++