Marlin,

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Holland many of the (real) larger "technical" companies were using MUMPS.

Similar to VFP you could become very knowledgeable about the insights of the product, and at that time I turned out to belong to this group (didn't say it myself really). But imagine this :

Back in 1980 I created some app, holding all the technical data for all of the materials used by the Dutch Oil Company (in fact "NAM"). This was about 120,000 materials each of them having specs of several pages. The main problem was : how to maintain (and fill out ..) that data with a group of around 10 persons. It took some 4 years to complete the app in full (it also contained lowlevel datacomm functions). It ran on a PDP11 (I guess a 2 Mhz machine ...;) and serverd several hundred concurrent users.
Two years ago I was invited their again to say goodbye to the last MUMPS app the company used. This was mine. An unbelieveable 20 years.

Two things in addition :
1. They (well, tried) to convert it to SAP (ERP) which took about $60M !!!
2. Some 10 years ago we rewrote the app of theirs as a module within our own ERP which took some two - three weeks.

What does #2 say ?
That no matter what smart MUMPS was, Fox is possibly more smart after all ...

And ehh, I did not create that module for nothing; the company asked for it, knowing that it would go "ERP". But the company has the mother company, and they decided that Fox was not the way to go for.
And this is back to the originals of this thread ...

Cheers,
Peter


>Hi Peter,
>
>I had my first "real" job programming in "M" (it had just been renamed from MUMPS). It was a great language. Amazing what it could do. I worked for a $100 million software company which used it almost exclusively.
>
>This was 10 years ago. The company has continued to thrive on "M".
>
>In fact, I had no idea that other companies used it! I had thought it was "dead" - it's fascinating to hear that Royal Dutch used it.
>
>I think it proves a point, though. In the end, all that matters is whether the customer's needs are met. Is their business running better? Is it more profitable because of your software? Are it's long-term prospects somehow enhanced by your product? If yes, then it doesn't really matter too much what the solution was. "M" solved many a company's problems extremely effectively, and it still does.
>
>What will happen to VFP? Who knows. Can't concern myself with that. There are problems to solve, and VFP is the best tool. Will it still be around in 10 years? I wouldn't even bet that .Net will be around in 10 years. Who the heck knows? I didn't think "M" would make it another 10 - it did.