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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>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 gave up on fishing... too easy! :) But, I may give the fish anyother try and a fighting chance after I retire in 10 or 15 years.

(snip)

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.

VFP more popular? C# is Microsoft's vision of the Language of the future (.NET), but legacy VFP apps will be around for 10 or more years... I'm heading toward tools that are more cross-platform... I sense a paradigm shift beginning to happen.