>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.
>
>


I recently read an editorial in Visual Basic Programmer's Journal that said the same thing about VB. It said something like this: "VB is so easy to use and so many unqualified people use it and create applications that are crap. It gives the professionals a bad name and image."