Hi John,

as much as I hate to admit it *s*, these numbers are an indication of a theory you threw in here earlier: VFP's popularity is decreasing.

The numbers have other reasons, though. Compare them, for example, with the combined activity in 1999 on the UT, the FoxForum and the MSDEVAPP forum with the activity of all FoxPro fora on CompuServe in 1995 or 1996. You'll probably notice that message count has been going down, too.

And there's another correlation. For many years, people were still using FP 2.x, but most FoxPro magazines reduces the 2.x parts heavily. For one, to keep in pace with technology, and because VFP requires so much to learn and therefore a lot of space in the magazines. A lot of folks canceled the subscription probably because there was to little for them about FoxPro 2.x. Does this mean that Advisor should have published more about 2.x? No, because than VFP users would have run away and in the long term the numbers would have been decreased even more.

Add that more folks are using third-party vendor frameworks and get much information they need from framework specific newsgroups, web sites and magazines, Codebook being one example.

And add the increasing amount of information that is available online about FoxPro and VFP, the increasing bandwidth that makes it possible for people to access these information quickly and the tendency of folks to get things as cheap as possible, and you have another factor why the number of issues decreases.

Add those folks that switched from FoxPro 2.x to another more procedural environment they could easily understand, or folks who re-evaluated their development tool of choice when they switched from DOS to Windows and weren't satisfied with VFP 3.


Christof