Hoi peter,

Long time no see.

>Wow, don't get involved too much, okay?!

>I think that Graig just only wanted to be of help to the person who asked for help. It's the task of the others (whereunder you and me) to be critical enough, but not to be offending. And I think that you've been somewhat offending and over-critical.

I guess I am and I did be a bit offending. I'm sorry about that, but I'm getting a bit frustrated with easy statements and incorrect claims. This is not how we build a high quality VFP community. Esspecially from GURU we'd expect the information to be correct and well balanced because a lot of people are listening to them. I guess I'm offended by the incorrectness, non scientifical, inrelevant and flawed statements comming from the GURU from time to time.

>When we're talking about standards, we're not only talking about standards within a company, or within a single application. No, we should also have in mind the big world-wide community of VFP-developers.

I think that is impossible. As I said before coding standard are highly personal. You could introduce a VFP coding standard, but every wiseguy will find a reason to change it. Also, you've got to deal with people who are coding VFP but never do read a VFP magazine (DL sheep ;-)). And of course it won't be easy to change it in existing projects. I just don't see it happen.

>In the Netherlands, we (at least you and I) know that there's no widely accepted standard for VFP-apps. Perhaps you think this is positive, but my personal opinion is that this fact alone may be held accountable for the poor image that Foxpro applications have in many of the companies.

I fully agree.

>VFP is a professional tool, but are VFP-developers professional enough???

I seriously doubt that. I've seen too much of VFP disasters (Again DL). Maybe there should be a MS certification for this subject only. But I think it even lies much deeper than this. The lack of scientifical approaches of writing algoritms, proving theories etc.

>What if there was an official school where youngsters were teached how to program in VFP? Suppose you were the teacher. Would you learn them THE standards? Or would you learn them YOUR standards? Or would you learn them to DEVELOP standards?

First I would learn them to develop a standard (Write a sample program with certain elements in it). After that, we are introducing a sample standard (probably mine), and after that they're free to develop a standard for the rest of the year. Whenever they write a program they have to keep to their standard. They may change a standard with each new program (Learning effect). At the end of the year you could get all developed standards (of each student) and discuss them globally.


>I'm a professional VFP-developer and I'd like to be able to say to each prospect who has a new app or a legacy app that needs an update: "Yes of course, I'll take care of it". That's not my reality however. The first thing I do is an audit (dig into the source code and check the degree of standards). All too often I either have to tell the prospect that it'll gonna cost him a lot of money, or I decide that it's an all too dangerous adventure and then I claim an even higher amount (of which I know for sure that I'll gonna be passed). World standards are VERY IMPORTANT for us, professional vfp-developers!

I could not agree more. All to often you'll end up in totally rewriting the project in a/your standard.


Walter,