>John- when I said "who cares" in another thread, it was for these reasons. It's just not worth getting worked up about, and we definitely shouldn't spend a lot of energy predicting outcomes that we can't know about, and have little control over. I think that that was Ed's sentiment for starting the thread, and I don't think it was a waste of bandwidth to say, anymore than any other thread in the Chatter section.

Erik, I tend to agree that predicting that VFP will go away and be supplanted by VB is a foolish assertion in a vacuum. There are enough people who will not abandon VFP to make it worthwhile for Microsoft to continue developing it, and it offers the only real challenge they have for data-centric development. With a relatively small and proficient user community, VFP is a good platform for MS to use as a guinea pig, as it did with VFP and the OO shift previously, before "inflicting" new paradigms on VB, which represents a larger, but on the whole, less devoted and focused, set of users.

I'd guess that the population of people migrating to VFP after having played with an xBASE equivalent, who want to move to a more polished and professional environment, represents a much smaller market share than power users who got their feet wet with Access or Office automation and feel the need for something more capable, that allows them to leverage their prior experience to make the jump to being a developer.

Asserting that no matter what you do and what other languages you have proficiency in, you're going to run into something that needs VB or VB-derived language proficiency is almost here now, at least if you stay in the Wintel platform. The result is that an investment in competency in VB pays off almost immediately, even if you never write a production system in straight VB for the rest of your life...