>This message was posted in the "Visual FoxPro Spanish Edition" forum, and think it is worth reading. Perhaps somebody volunteers to translate it (my spanish->portuguese->english translation is terrible!).
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>Message Id 665117 (
Que empuje tiene VFP en Latinoamerica ?) by Ricardo Fynn Reissig.
>
>Fernando
OK, Fernando. I don't know what this will accomplish, but here it goes, since I take it as a good exercise for me, here is the translation you requested. HTH.
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I dare extract a few paragraphs from a message sent to Pablo Roca by Adrian Hernandez in order to pose a question and also to relieve some stress.
AH>-Listen, that program looks good, did you do it in Visual Basic?
AH>-No, it's Visual FoxPro.
AH>-FoxWhat? But it looks like Visual Basic, and I have never heard of VFP. What's the difference?
AH>And here is where the teaching about the good things in VFP. I don't know how it may be in other countries, but in Mexico, the VFP-VB usage should be in the approximate range of 5 - 95. And it's that, regretably, when the common folk hear programming, as a general rule, think about Visual Basic. If I can tell people in each of my applications, "Hey, Look!!! I did this with VFP" and this serves to prompt the users' thinking, "Listen, those Fox guys are a good alternative... we should think about more Fox solutions" Where is the harm in that moniker? That it's not backward? Even when I think about using my own "Powered", this is an aspect that would lose relevance if the objective of atracting attention to Fox.
I would like to explore in this forum what is the push that Microsoft gives VFP and in each of the Latin American countries, what is the percentage of existing developers.
Here in Uruguay, albeit a small country there is a high percentage of professionals in this technology, including first level enterprises with a global scale are installing in Montevideo as their development headquarters (luckily).
Around these parts the relation of VFP versus VB is 1 to 99 and the VFP developers do it for the most part as if it were regular xBase.
But worse yet, VFP is classified as "Microsoft's retarded child", icluding people from the company itself. As an anecdote, in Motevideo's Developer's Day 2002, a speech presenting .NET, a foreign representative from Microsoft asks the public: "Raise your hands if you do your development in VFP.", when a substantial group raise their hands, he responds: "sorry guys", after this, general laughter.
Upon reviewing the Adrian's sample, I grow tired of fighting with other developers for the darned comparisons with VB, and it depresses me that here in Uruguay, official MS courses on VFP are non existent, therefore if someone wants to study the language, let him buy a book at Amazon.com and let him bang his head against the wall. Forget about the MCSD title, Most Valuable Professional and other similar designations.
I develop in other languages (Fortran, C++, T-SQL, Genexus, even VB), but I especially appreciate VFP since I know it from the time I used Xenix, plus I have been knowledgeable about its virtues for years, back when VB wasn't even in my mind (OOP, SQL, DBF, etc.).
I am tired of listening: "Fox is going to be discontinued" or "Fox has a signed death certificate", I've been hearing this since FoxPro version 2.6, and I really don't have reference sources in Uruguay to be able to clarify this and other such themes.
Another theme that regretably comes by here is that a VFP application has less value than one developed in VB, C++ or another language.
It is a disgrace that VFP has been "beaten down" by the developer community, for which (without going into a tangent) putting the logo "Powered by VFP" in my applications automatically discualifies me from a circle on which to make adjustments in particular, and never mind about final costs; VFP is looked at as a "toy" language.
What hurts me the most is that MS Uruguay does nothing to bring out this tool, possibly they plan to let it die.
I can add to all this that job requests for VFP developers is almost non existent.
Greetings to the community.
RFR
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PabloSr, Still Learning!
DevDBFox
