Ed,

After thinking about this for a while, I don't even think FUD is the right word to describe what is being voiced here.

First of all, anyone, and I mean anyone with any common sense would see be able to look at a list of jobs these days and see that VFP is way down on the list, if it even makes the list at all. This is a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor. As of right now, everyone is on equal footing with .Net. I don't even buy the argument that people don't have home computers to be able to learn something new. If someone has enough time to post messages here, they should be able to find the time to learn something new.

Second, I've always been a corporate developer. I've learned whatever was put in front of me. If I was told the next project was to be in Oracle, so be it. You've mentioned you are now a manager of an IT group. I would think high on the list of abilities of people in your group, is the ability to be flexible. It tells me something about an IT person, if the don't want to learn new skills. I seriously question their abilities in areas, including their supposed area of expertise. For example, I would have serious doubts about a VFP programmers expertise in building COM dlls, writing TSQL or PLSQL to be able to access data on a Enterprise DB backend.

Unfortunately, I've worked in a couple places in the last couple years where there's always an older guy, sitting by himself in a corner cube. He's the one with all the knowledge of some old Cobol system. In some cases they've been happy in their lot in life. In others they can't figure out why they've been passed over for promotion countless times.

And to close, I wish I could come up with a pithy closing comment. BBC America is having a best of weekend. Maybe I can catch something on "Father Ted" or "Ab Fab". We shall see.

PF

>>>Jess,
>>>
>>>A few questions.
>>>
>>>> Majority of my colleagues here want VFP to be .Net language.
>>>
>>>First question, what is a .NET language? Is it a language that can consume .NET services? If so then VFP is already one.
>>
>>It should compile with CLR..
>
>That's nonesense - you're saying that VFP should limit its behavior to the behaviors in the CLR environment. Say goodbye to everything in VFP that violates the intepreter model behind CLR. Or are you saying at the CLR should contain all the native constructs of VFP? If so, why is there a need for anything other than VFP?
>
>NOTHING compiles with CLR. The CLR-compatible language compiler emits CLR p-code, which contains a very narrow set of behaviors. If you wish to treat the p-code of the CLR as the basis of building an interpreter, you end up creating something close to a beaded threaded interpreter model of language behavior, similar in philosophy to Forth. You essentially have to take all of the optimization going on inside of the VFP native interpreter that right now makes no concessions to the requirements of the codeset of a virtual machine code, and rethink them in terms of CLR expression. At the very least, with multiple levels of interpretation, the level of the VFP interpreter, which handles things like macroexecution, name resolution, name indirection, loose typing, free declaration of variables and properties, not to mention the embedded data language, and now rather than execute native code, reemit CLR p-code, which must be interpreted. We end up bulky and slow, and unable to
>offer any advantage over other CLR languages, because our interpreter model is at wide variance with the CLR interpretation model.
>
>If I get a vote, I'd vote NO. But then, I'd like to sacrifice a lot of things that we perpetuate supporting backwards compatibility for streamlining; I've been told by people who know a lot more than I do that as long as our underlying interpreter behaviors stay much the same, we can keep considerably more backwards compatibility with adding great bulk (IOW, some of the new services are built on the code behind some backwards compatible features, so there's low cost to the backwards compatibility) but that all changes when we have to switch to think in terms of the CLR model of behavior.
>
>Personally, I trust the judgement of people like Ken Levy and Calvin Hsia and Gene Goldhammer, who are determining what directions we can move in and keep the uniqueness of VFP, more than the wishes of a few, terrified developers who see the world is moving to a new model of computing, that might leave them behind, but won't change their mind-set out of the world of ten years ago.
>
>Face it, Jess, you have to either evolve or die. Which is a personal decision.
>
>I don't make the rules, I just play the game.