>>>>>>Here in Brazil we have frequently heard that Microsoft will abandon Visual
>>>>>>FoxPro. Because this rumors many clipper developers are mainly going to
>>>>>>DELPHI and Visual basic.
>>>>>>
>>>>>Visual FoxPro is not going away. Microsoft is supporting it.
>>>>>
>>>>>However, Microsoft is in favor of abandoning DELPHI. :)
>>>>Carl,
>>>>
>>>>Just a note I think you'll appreciate. You did have the April Fools joke on your web site, am I correct?
>>>>
>>>>There was a message in teh VFOX forum on Compuserve about a wekk ago form a friend of mine in the DC area. he said that the company he is working with had proposed a system for one of the military branches of the US (which the company really didn't want to do) to be done in VFP. The project was denied and in the lenghty denial the VFP VBA web information was quoted as part of the proof that VFP was not a viable language to be used <g>. An example of our government at work, dupped by an April Fools Joke.
>>>
>>>
>>>I love all the bad press that VFP gets. All the scared programmers running to weaker, less flexible DBMS's. More work for me! I love it. ;-)
>>>
>>>Seriously though, I think VFP kicks tail for data delivery, and improvements are made regularly. VFP marketed itself last year without any help from the MS machine and now MS has seen the light and has finally begun to put marketing dollars behind VFP, which is, if not its best, one of its best development platforms. As developers, it then becomes our responsibility to show all these nay-sayers what VFP can really do. I'm up for challenge...and excited about it.
>>>
>>>Just my humble (NOT) opinion...
>>>
>>>Matt
>>
>>I agree with you Matt, but there is a grave problem here: there is no such thing as entry-level Fox programmer anymore (basically), and this fact is driven the language down: many companies just cannot afford to hire senior-level people only.
>
>Ed, that's an excellent point. But I'm a little lost on that too. I'm self-taught. I never took a day of class in FoxPro. I taught myself FPW2.5 and have evolved into a pretty good programmer, now finally using 5.0. I love .HLP files, in fact, my .HLP is open pretty much all day long. I'm lazy I guess. I don't learn the syntax except through repetition. I've always been more concerned with the conceptual understanding of DBMS's and logical algorithm development rather than the specifics of FP syntax and rules, that's what reference materials are for. I'm going to try to pick up VB this year and have already dabbled in C++. I'm hoping that my high school days of writing games in BASIC will help....
>
>But my point is (making a short story long)...what does one expect from an entry-level programmer...in any language? There are syntax rules and function libraries in other languages, why is FP considered so much worse?
>
>Matt

Yes, you are self-taught, and me too... but companies are not, they are dreaming about uniformed propgrammers packing uniformed code written in uniformed language. We know that is nonsense in real programming world, but again who cares what we are thinking about. Open some software (not only MS) ads and you will get sure that you shouldn't understand DBMS logics to get system ready.