The foregoing has been an interesting discourse, with the exception of continuting challenges and questions, and then following them with the "why do you waste your time on this?" statements.

MY own input: I have made $$ using FP and VFP, a goodly sum of it. I am not asheamed of it, either. ( just ashamed of the occasional boo boo along the way)One big helper is that the developer community using this tool is shrinking. This is putting my skills in a higher level of demand. and in an area I really hate to go and that is maintaining or modifying someone else's code, who is no long available.

The gravy: Creating the new application from scratch, re-using all those custom written classes, procedures, and things that have worked for me before and are bulletproof.

Many employers (and clients) desire you to be familiar with their usiness plan, where I more or less just consider it just data to be manipulated in desirable ways.

But as a skill back up for this old guy, I am learning the Oracle development and data environment. For recrestion, I am still chuckling over the required work-arounds to make VB/SQL do something beside utter simple views.
Well, I do some fishing too, but what the heck, I am nearing retirement.

I would love to see a consortium of VFP developers form up to assist all us old developers that will have skills and time to spare in doing off site contracting, and provide a single POC. because I feel soon this is where it will be at, and I think a little competition with India, Malaysia, and Russia would be healthy.

Should VFP become more popular, I am in on the ground floor, if not, whether I like the tool or not, I will have backup skills in order to remain employed.