There are two things that give VFP a bad name.

1.) The negative press from uniformed journalists or M$ goons
that do not know any better.

2.) A large supply of incompetent VFP programmers.


Recently I did an "outside" job for a small company. A programmer
was using VFP 5 (but coding as a FoxBase+ app complete with B->field syntax)
and left the company. They asked me to come in and do a little
maintance until they could rewrite it all in VB. The first question
was why spend any money on VFP - Microsoft is dropping it - isn't it?
No. "Oh really, well that is what I was told". Oh yeah, by whom? Don't
recall but it sure seems like I heard it.

Yep, as Dan Byers said in a post some time ago - that's correct VFP 3.0
was the last version. Oops, or was the last version VFP 5 or
VFP 6 or VFP 7?

It is hard to get in the door with all the negative impressions from
mindless lemmings that read a trade rag while sitting in the crapper.

One of the other dangers of VFP is its ease of use. There are way too
many so called VFP programmers that have NEVER in there life written
a single class, created an updateable view or know what a primary key is.
How hard is it to run rings around a VFP app that is written
as if it were still dBASE II? I see things like 30 fields being updated
with the following syntax:

REPLACE field1 WITH 1
REPLACE field2 WITH 2
...
REPLACE field30 WITH 30

instead of a single REPLACE field1 WITH 1, field2 WITH 2, ... field3 WITH 3

The company I am helping extracts 500,000 rows of a 155 column backend
table only to look for the last 3 days of data (about 300 records)!
I asked why they did not use a parameterized view. As you might guess the answer was - "what's that?". So we sat and waited 30 minutes for the results
to be pulled down. Amazingly it now takes less than 10 seconds.

That is why the VFP certification tests are a good thing in my opinion will set people apart from the hackers.


>Ken,
>
>I think a lot comes from managers who depend on Gartner Group for their information. It's easier to manage according to Gartner than to think or learn for yourself.
>
>
>>Folks,
>>
>>I generally try to ignore all of the 'Fox is Dead' threads that come up, but the simple fact that they come up again and again is quite disturbing. A lot of people seem to think that Fox is gone already, and I have been contending with the results for at least two years.
>>
>>There is a famous story that LBJ wanted one of his campaign managers to accuse his component of being a pig-F*****. The manager objected, 'I can't call him that!!' To which LBJ replied, 'I don't care, just make him deny it!' It seems to me that we in the Fox Community do a lot of denying. It's not dead! we object again and again. It is very discouraging to have to keep insisting on this point.
>>
>>Before 1997, no client or decision maker I dealt with ever cared what tool I used. Never. Since about mid-1997 or so they have all somehow acquired the impression that Fox is obsolete and doomed. Since many of these decision makers are not technical people, their opinions are all the more devastating; they will do what they think is safe, and they all fall back on the same tired responses: 'Sure, Ken, Fox is better, but so was Betamax.'
>>
>>I met the CTO of a large corporation whose very first sentence to me was that he was not 'technical' (coming from a CTO, that sounded like, 'Hi, I'm not qualified for my job'). He then told me all of his reasons for preferring Visual Basic over anything. To a programmer, they were all foolish and naive. But what does it matter? He has the power and he will make the decisions.
>>
>>I'm just curious about what people think: Most of us know that Fox is one of the best overall products ever to exist, even granting its weaknesses in some areas, but do you really think we can survive the continuous onslaught of misinformation and trends?