Hi Mike,

I basically agree. At one moment there's a problem, you search for a solution, find one, soon find one that's even better. If you're lucky, then someone else points you to a drawback of that solution and suggests an even better solution. If it's not too late, you'll switch to the better solution. This was the learning phase. The last step of the learning phase is the full acceptance of the solution, it'll become a part of your standard ways of doing things. Afterall, there are other problems too that need attention. In the end the expert has a complete set of standards for all kinds of problems. Routine will ease life and bring in the big money.

I have no big problem with that. After all, we're not professors or academic researchers. But some of us are 'teachers' who do (wanna) influence the 'young'. And others are challenged by the 'young', or should I say the 'new'. Or perhaps challenged rather by the opponents, who may be equally experts, but had another learning content. The arguments in favor of the solution are sometimes even partly forgotten. And especcially in our profession, the tools (vfp for us) and methods (e.g. procedual versus oop) are modified over time and make some (not all!) old arguments obsolete.

On the UT, I'm regularly searching for solutions. But sometimes I'm not satisfied with a 'recipe' only. Then I also want to know the arguments behind the recipe, the fundamentals. Maybe that's asked too much, especcially when different experts happen to have different arguments. Maybe it's the domain of books and articles, rather than of the threads on the UT. On the other hand, since we don't have a vfp-university and since books and articles are not interactive, forums like the UT may be the best place for fundamental discussions, for 'Holy Wars'. The chatter category may be too lightweight for that kind of discussions.


>Hi Jim
>
>I've found many people are not interested in doing things better, but rather in doing things as they have always done them.
>
>>SNIP
>>>Statements about performance penalties have been abundant in the last decade and still have their impact on many programmers. I challenge those judgments and think that they're obsolete.
>>
>>You have a very strong point in this day of multi-gigahertz processors and huge RAMs and much faster hard drives.
>>
>>But human nature is such that we ALWAYS want to do the best job possible. In our business, coding what the user needs with a friendly UI that 'makes sense' to all users and simple deployment are the base factors.
>>Then you get into things like code readability and verification of function and efficiency, and to most of us these are equally important to all of the other factors.
>>
>>I was going to say that it might be comparable to a Reubens or Van Gogh versus a Nelson or De Valença but that doesn't really work because in our business something can LOOK good but be a pile of crap internally.
>>
>>In any case, I do think that none of us wishes to waste anything as a general rule and that all of us wish to do the best work possible. So we naturally have efficiency as one of our goals.
>>
>>Now I do think that you bring up an important point - that "conventional wisdom" should always be subject to scrutiny. And I certainly feel that it is particularly important in our business, where things change all the time and in such wide and varying ways.
>>I remember well WalterM's questioning of the 'always TAG on DELETED()' convention. While almost ridiculed at the start, his tenacity coupled with the fortuitous publication of an article with a similar conclusion in FoxPro Advisor resulted in an important shift in how many of us handle that issue.
>>There have been some other examples too. Maybe some day MS will give us a way to do controlled fragmentation so that we can also exploit that to our benefit < s >.
>>
>>cheers